Minor Places

Gilded palaces

2011-09-13T22:21:00.000+01:00

If there are two things I dislike with a moderate but consistent intensity, they are shopping malls and crowds. So it was against all sorts of better judgement that I visited Westfield Stratford this evening.

As we walked through the thronged corridors of shops clad in gleaming marble, shiny glass and fashionably-distressed copper, my companion observed that the crowds really looked and sounded like East London - loud, ethnically mixed, not particularly well-heeled.

This reminded me of a middle-aged man I watched being interviewed when the Royal Festival Hall was refurbished in 2007. When the building opened in the 1940s, the interviewee was growing up in South London, and vividly remembered his first visit to the venue: he could not believe that someone like him was not only allowed but encouraged to visit somewhere with this thickness of carpet, this richness of marble, this elegance of balustrade.

In many ways Westfield Stratford, the apotheosis of 21st century consumer capitalism, is the polar opposite of the Royal Festival Hall, with its high-minded aspirations towards 'culture for the masses'. But the buildings share something too: like the Festival Hall, Westfield Stratford isn't a dumbed-down version of something else. It doesn't fob local people off with cheap finishes and 'value' retail outlets, but gives them as good a high-end shopping mall that it would build anywhere else.

There are plenty of criticisms to level at malls - their gaudy promotion of consumerist fantasy, their impact on neighbouring shops, their introverted street systems and privatised public space - and Westfield Stratford will probably be accused of many of these. But it doesn't patronise, or pander to presumed poverty of aspiration. It deserves credit for that.

The chronic

2011-09-03T10:49:00.009+01:00

There's a wonderful scene in Generation Kill, the HBO mini-series following a battalion of US Marines through the confusion of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, when the embedded journalist asks Lt Col Stephen 'Godfather' Ferrando why he speaks with such gravelly whisper.

"Throat cancer," Godfather rasps laconically.

"You a smoker?" asks the journalist.

"No," a long pause, "just lucky, I guess."

I've been thinking of this exchange as conversations with friends and acquaintances have touched on the various illnesses - heart disease, liver problems, cancers, degenerative conditions - that are beginning to intrude on forty-something lives. Almost invariably, the first reaction is, "But s/he doesn't smoke/drink that much/eat turkey twizzlers/[insert bad habit of choice]."

I wonder whether this surprise at people becoming ill despite their virtuous lifestyles is a peculiarly modern way of thinking. Medical science has made huge advances in digging beneath the symptoms to identify the underlying epidemiology, physiology and causes of diseases, and equally great strides in identifying the environmental or behavioural factors that can increase or decrease susceptibility to particular diseases.

But only very rarely has science identified a straightforward and un-varying causation: if you do x, you will contract y; if not, not. 'Luck' (which is actually how we describe causal factors that we don't understand) continues to play a part: only an idiot would deny the links between smoking and lung cancer, but 10 per cent of lung cancer cases still arise in non-smokers. We prefer certainty, and not to acknowledge that "time and chance happeneth to all" (hence, I suspect, the scrabble to blame non-smokers' cancers on 'passive smoking'). And governments collude in the process, understanding that preventing the damage caused by unhealthy lifestyles works better, and probably costs less, than medical intervention to reverse or mitigate it in later life.

But is this assumption that our lifestyles can protect us from illness really a symptom of modernism, or does it represent the atavistic resurgence of something much older - a perception of disease as a punishment for moral iniquity? This view broke cover in the early days of HIV (memorably satirised in Brasseye's distinction between 'good AIDS' and 'bad AIDS'), and persists in the absurd economic debates about whether smokers pay more in excise duty than they cost in medical care, and in the vilification of poor people for their diets. In understanding epidemiology, have we slipped back to attributing blame?

Control

2011-08-13T09:38:00.006+01:00

My understanding of life as a poor teenager on an inner city housing estate is about as sophisticated as the Downing Street cat's take on politics: I can see it, where I live and where I work, but my analysis is superficial at best. Nonetheless, a few days after riots in London, thoughts and analyses race through my head, as the muttering backbeat of commentary - both banal and insightful - grows in volume. So, here's what I think today.

On Wednesday, Boris Johnson told the Today Programme, "Over 20 or 30 years we have got into a situation where young people have a massive sense of entitlement." Leaving aside trite scoffs about his own Eton-educated sense of entitlement, he's on to something here. A sense of entitlement and benefit dependency are a reality for many poor people today, but the deeper tragedy is when this becomes the only reality.

From where I stand (and my limited perspective may be part of the problem), this world of entitlement and dependency looks pretty bleak - alienated from the sense of self-worth that work can generate, with weak family and social networks (apart from the toxic ties of gang culture), in grim environments illuminated only by the iconography of consumption. Russell Brand, writing in yesterday's Guardian, was typically eloquent: "The only light in their lives comes from these luminous corporate messages. No wonder they have their fucking hoods up."

Benefits and precarious rights are the only stake that this class has in society. Should it surprise us that threats to these residual rights are regarded as an assault? Should we wonder that any fleeting opportunities to seize control and to share in consumer culture are embraced? We'd like to think that education and employment initiatives can create those opportunities. For the lucky few they do, but that path looks increasingly steep, rocky and uncertain.

If you take a left perspective - and it's increasingly hard to find any others that make sense - you start to wonder what the role of the benefits system actually is. In the era when the spectre of communism was seen as a real threat to burgeoning capitalism, was social security used, like 'liquid cosh' in an old people's home, to pacify the masses and prevent them from rising up to seize control of a system that loaded the dice against them?

Perhaps the road to this week's riots is a long one, leading back through the last forty years, as working class culture wilted in a post-industrial economy, as the soviet regime faltered and fell, and as capitalism's leash was loosened by successive governments. The demented bout of speculation that ensued took the system to the brink of collapse, but the banks were bailed out, like rich kids in magistrates' courts, while welfare spending tightened and jobs became fewer and fewer - 'socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor'. Seen through this lens, it is not the riots that are remarkable, but the fact that peace was not breached far earlier.

In this uncertain state of crisis, the dependency relationship created by benefits may be one of the few ties that continue to bind the poor to the rest of society. The irony of the current situation may be that, by cutting benefits across the board (let alone withdrawing them from those involved in rioting), the Government may be undermining one of the few bulwarks that continue to defend a decadent and discredited capitalism.

Step on

2011-08-11T20:09:00.006+01:00

After the riots, the surge of opinion and analysis. As Aditya Chakrabortty observed in today's Guardian, this week's mayhem has acted like a tumultuous Rorschach Test in which everyone can see what they want to see. So, three quick thoughts on the week's events (please take 'nothing can justify', 'London is the poorer' and 'in a very real way, we are all guilty' as read):

As any halfway-decent engineer understands, suspension bridges wobble worst when crowds fall into step: the unified pace amplifies the sway, and bridges become perilous. This natural tendency to lock step scuppered the Millennium Bridge in 2000, and a sign on Albert Bridge still warns troops to break step. Social networking enabled the rioters to converge and focus their looting, but enabled the clean-up too. The cumulative impact was dramatic: just as rioters overwhelmed the police, volunteer street cleaners swamped Hackney and had to be redirected to Clapham Junction. The capacity of social networks to foment groupthink makes for a queasy feeling, like being on a ship that lurches, as its passengers rush first one way then another. This alleged anarchy was built upon systems and herd mentality.

The roll-call of closed roads on Tuesday's radio bulletins gave a trivial taste of what is must be like to live in a war zone, never sure from one morning to the next what districts remain intact. It showcased the precariousness of urban life: the actions of a few hundred teenagers can quickly disrupt the delicately-balanced metabolism of the ecosystem (as can a few days' fuel blockade, or a heavy snowfall). But Tuesday also showed the resilience of that ecosystem: people picked their way past burnt-out buildings to the tube, and shops continued to operate from behind smashed windows.

Finally, the riots may not have been explicitly political, but they were about power. Or at least about powerlessness. It may be as futile as it is presumptuous to speculate about individual rioters' motives, but it is not hard to read into the faces captured on CCTV the euphoric rush of suddenly and surprisingly being in control - of your life, of your neighbourhood, of your scared fellow citizens. The price to be paid for those moments will be harsh, but will the violent euphoria prove addictive?

Communing wth locale

2011-05-30T09:28:00.002+01:00

The random public sector buzz-word generator has been at work again, this time supporting the conference industry. I am invited to a conference that is entitled 'The Next Steps in Localising Communities: Localising Power, Empowering Citizens and Building Communities'

This babbling brook of gibberish is actually quite impressive in that it manages to combine New Labour's vacuous 'communities' rhetoric with the Coalition's equally inchoate commitment to 'localism'. A genuinely historic alignment.

It is also, at heart, almost entirely meaningless: how on earth does one localise a community? The words could be re-arranged at will - like a syntactical anagram - to make no more or less sense. 'Building the Locale: Empowering Communities, Localising Citizens and Localising Power', anyone? It makes no more sense and no less.

The attraction of laws

2011-05-19T20:15:00.006+01:00

Tbings fall apart and you wonder - increasingly - whether the centre can hold. Just as one part of the Government is offering to repeal laws on demand, in the name of 'cutting red tape', other ministers are promising to introduce some of silliest-sounding laws in history: a law to guarantee a level of overseas aid equivalent to 0.7 per cent of gross national income, and a law to put the 'military covenant', which recognises the sacrifices made by the armed services and commits to fair treatment, on a statutory footing.

The issue is not fair treatment for service personnel or to generous overseas aid. Both are laudable aims. But neither needs laws. Proper treatment of the armed services is a budgetary and administrative matter, as is overseas aid. These laws will not create new offences, new rights or new statutory powers. So why take parliamentary time up with them?

Three explanations suggest themselves. One is that the Government is grand-standing; using legislation to make these administrative commitments is simply a way of underlining their importance, of inscribing press releases on vellum. A second explanation is that the Government is simply trying to wrong foot any of its successors who would want to govern differently; what they could do by fiat, they will make their successors do by law (or face the consequences of trying to repeal legislation).

A third explanation is perhaps more disturbing, if less cynical. As our constitution forms the executive from the legislature, it must be easy to confuse making laws with governing the country. This must pose a particular problem to a Conservative/LibDem coalition. They are pledged to roll back the frenzied law-making of which they accuse the previous government. But they can't stop legislating, any more than a shark can stop swimming as it sleeps. Making laws is what Parliament does, what governments do. So, instead of seeking to meddle in the every day behaviour of citizens, they have turned their gaze inwards, and apply the harsh discipline of statute to themselves and their successors.

Gold against the soul

2011-05-14T09:44:00.003+01:00

It's hard to know what to say about this extraordinary object, on display in a shop in Mount Street last weekend. Suffice to say that it was one of the more restrained (if sexually disturbed) objects in the shop, in that only the loo seat was painted gold. The rest of the stock would have made Liberace look like the consummate minimalist.

Taking liberties

2011-05-07T17:56:00.005+01:00

Pubs in London seem to be full of people taking offence at each other. A few weeks ago, two young men were turfed out of the cholera-grim John Snow in Soho for kissing each other. Outrage and kiss-ins ensued. And the following week a woman was ejected from the William IV (co-incidentally - or at least I think co-incidentally - a gay pub) in Hampstead for breast-feeding. Again, outrage was expressed, spokespeople spoke, and a feed-in is planned.

My first instinct was that throwing people out of pubs for this sort of behaviour was a disgrace. A gay kiss should hardly shock anyone in Soho, and I would have thought public breast-feeding was almost de rigeur in Hampstead. As a liberal, it's not my place to object to anything legal that anyone wants to do in a pub - or anywhere else.

But I found the shrill spirals of denuciation and protest almost equally irritating: nobody was attacked; no violence was committed; have we nothing better to protest about? Also, I can hear my inner Kingsley Amis harrumphing, and looking wistfully back at the days of smokey drinking dens with herodian attitudes to children: shouldn't pubs being places for adults to drink alcohol and talk, not facilities for making-out and nursing?

More seriously, public behaviour is about manners as well as rights: just because you legally can do something, doesn't mean that you should. Almost any behaviour can be appropriate or inappropriate depending on context - an axiom that dogmatic assertions of rights overlook. Writing on my favourite mad libertarian website, Spiked, Frank Furedi has argued against those who reject a basic level of liberal tolerance, which permits but does not approve or disapprove, in favour of 'celebrating' and 'respecting' other people's beliefs, lifestyles, etc.

Perhaps, as I glide into middle age, I should adopt a posture of grouchy liberalism - defending absolutely the rights of people to act as they will, but grumbling intermittently when they do so.

The lost art of keeping a secret

2011-05-05T20:04:00.004+01:00

The foundation of British democracy is the secret ballot, no?

Voting this morning, I noticed something that had niggled with me previously (though I am far from being the first person to have noticed it). When I gave my name and address, a man tore me a ballot paper from a book, and the woman with the list of addresses read out a number to the man with the book, who wrote it on the counterfoil.

Didn't this mean that they could look at my ballot paper, and identify how I voted by cross-referencing with my electoral roll number, I asked? Yes, answered the Presiding Officer, but only on the orders of an Electoral Court, which was a very rare occcurrence. So the local authority would keep, indefinitely, a record of how every local elector had voted in every election? Yes, but it was kept safe.

The Presiding Officer was a thoroughly respectable looking gent (handlebar moustache, book about lancaster bombers), so I didn't pry further. I can also understand why some records are necessary, to test allegations that large numbers of ballots have been handed out as job lots to candidates' families and other such malfeasance.

But this secret recording of individual voting patterns still seems a bit rum. I am no more paranoid than one should be, but a lesson of modern times seems to be that all data is eventually leaked and/or fed into government databases. You can easily imagine the security services making a strong case for (limited, of course, checked and balanced) access to such information, so they could identify potential menaces to society voting for 'extremists'.

We should, I suppose, feel glad that we don't live in a repressive surveillance state, that would abuse and misuse such personal information. Shouldn't we?

Rising in the East

2011-04-22T09:12:00.003+01:00

Boris Johnson's Olympic Park Orbit. Freud would have a field day.

Who needs remote control?

2011-04-09T17:45:00.006+01:00

It's commonplace (and generally inaccurate) to suggest that left and right are meaningless labels, that ideological differences between Labour and Conservative have evaporated, that we are all thatcherites now. Though the Coalition has outflanked Labour in its liberalism (it would be hard to imagine how to be more authoritarian, without introducing martial law), their economic policies are pretty dry, neo-con even.

But if clear blue water is visible in terms of content, an even more dramatic difference in style is becoming visible. Today, Ken Clarke is reported as criticising his colleagues for their tendency to leave ministers hanging when their policies prove controversial. Witness Andrew Lansley's 'pause to listen'; witness Caroline Spelman's forced retreat from privatising forests.

The Coalition lacks the discipline and control mechanism of a strong Number 10 policy unit, endlessly second-guessing ministers and re-writing their policies. Ministers are free to announce pretty well anything they like - however radical, daring or plain mad it may be - but are also free to take the blame alone if they get it wrong. In this darwinian policy competition of rugged individualism, the fittest survive and the laggards are thrown to the wolves.

By contrast, for all its embrace of market capitalism, the Labour government stayed true to its collectivist roots. Even as Tony Blair became more and more presidential, the approach was stalinist: to borrown Bagehot's terminology, the 'dignified' trappings of collective cabinet government stayed in place, while the 'efficient' mechanisms of sofa government dictated policy throughout Whitehall.

Quod erat demonstrandum?

2011-03-27T14:52:00.007+01:00

Some scenes from yesterday's march:

Near Westminster, two French tourists (wearing his'n'hers pastel anoraks that give the lie to their country's stereotype of fashion consciousness) wander into the demonstration from a side alley. With consistency that is admirable going on for perverse, the policeman who had had refused to let me use that alley as a short-cut refuses to let them back the way they came, so they have to join the crowd, weaving between GMB and student union banners as the sluggish current carries them along to Parliament Square.

Walking up Regent Street (past an unattacked Apple Store), the absence of cars and buses creates an eerie calm, broken only by distant sirens and the repressive chatter of helicopters' rotors. A tweedy woman walks past, shouting into a mobile phone her shrill shock at the disruption to her shopping trip.

North of Oxford Circus, a gaggle of protestors surround two fleeing figures in hoodies, shouting 'Police informer! Police informer!' and trying to photograph their faces. To prove their point, the hoodied figures mutter a few words to the police forming a cordon round Topshop, and are let through. Outside, vindicated, their pursuers leap up and down with glee. I am uncomfortably reminded of the old black-and-white photos of the denuciations of collaborators in post-war France.

At least they're honest about it...

2011-02-17T08:29:00.003Z

Leyton, 14 February 2011.

We are family?

2010-11-26T09:03:00.003Z

Martin Amis has been sharing his views on UK-Israel relations with Ha'aretz.

"I live in a mildly anti-Semitic country, and Europe is mildly anti-Semitic, and they hold Israel to a higher moral standard than its neighbors. If you bring up Israel in a public meeting in England, the whole atmosphere changes. The standard left-wing person never feels more comfortable than when attacking Israel. Because they are the only foreigners you can attack. Everyone else is protected by having dark skin, or colonial history, or something. But you can attack Israel. And the atmosphere becomes very unpleasant. It is traditional, snobbish, British anti-Semitism combined with present-day circumstances."

He's half-right. Israel does get a fair amount of stick from European lefties, but I have never bought the argument that this is a matter of anti-Semitism. Rather, it is a result of conscious or sub-conscious prejudice in our expectations of other middle-eastern states. We expect savage behaviour from them (and, sad to say, are all-too-often proved right). It's part of what the late Edward Said would have seen as the 'orientalising' narrative, the depiction of the East as a mysterious 'other', the home of Kipling's "lesser breeds without the law".

We do hold Israelis to higher standards, but because of familiarity rather than prejudice. We see them as displaced Europeans, rather than Asians, so hold them to what we fondly still suppose to be European standards of behaviour. Our criticisms of Israeli behaviour are an inverted tribute to our kinship.

The man who waters the workers' benefits?

2010-10-22T19:22:00.005+01:00

My copy of PCS View, my trade union's magazine, arrived through the door on Wednesday, promising to "fight the cuts" before they had even been announced, and condemning the Government for "making ordinary people pay for the economic crisis".

All fair enough, I thought, and directed the magazine towards my recycling bin, together with the assorted flyers and leaflets that accompanied it. Then I stopped and looked at some of these. Most were offering financial services of one sort or another. For example, PCS+, directly affiliated to the union, was offering life insurance. For a mere £12.60 per month, I would receive a payout of £7,500 on my death, or a cashback of £3,301 if I survived till I was 70. Great, except that for the same premium Aviva would insure my life for £75,000 - 10 times the value! - and the cashback would actually represent £1,000 less than had been paid in, even ignoring inflation. "For many people", the blurb read, "an unexpected death could mean financial disaster." Especially if coupled with life insurance from PCS+.

Scottish Friendly were also advertising their services, and in particular their 15-year MoneyBuilder plan - essentially a 'with profits' savings plan, like those wonderful Equitable Life schemes. For an initial investment of £10 per month, rising to £20 per month by year 6, you would receive a guaranteed lump sum of £2,959 after 15 years - only a few hundred pounds less than your total investment of £3,240. A four per cent annual growth rate, which seems pretty optimistic in these times, might even earn you all your money back (though inflation would have significantly reduced its value while Scottish Friendly sat on it).

And I thought that trade unions were meant to fight against the exploitation of workers, not to collude in it.

Papal bull

2010-09-18T17:05:00.005+01:00

It may be a slow news week, but I have been finding it hard to understand the sheer volume of media coverage of the Pope's visit. I appreciate that he is the leader of one of most important world religions, but can that really be worth so much newsprint in our - allegedly - secular society?

This afternoon, I had an epiphany. This isn't really about the Pope. Like African conflicts during the cold war, this is a proxy battle in our very own 'culture wars'. On the one side are the evangelical rationalists, Dawkins et al, to whom the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church represent something atavistic and unsavoury, slouching into the 21st Century dragging medieval convictions (and the taint of negligence in relation to child abuse) behind them.

On the other side, are conservative pundits and newspapers, seizing on the Pope's denunciation of secularism to amplify their fears of Christmas being replaced by 'winterval' in town halls up and down the land, of celebrities taking the place of deities, of moral relativism rampant, and of cross-wearing banned by petty bureaucrats.

As in the USA, the tone adopted by the culture warriors is shrill, and neither side is really interested in the other's views as anything other than a target for denunciation and derision. This is a dialogue of the deaf.

Careless whispers

2010-09-01T21:00:00.003+01:00

Reporting on the resignation of William Hague's special advisor this afternoon, the Evening Standard alludes, censoriously and primly, to "rumours that had been circulating on the internet [about the nature of their relationship]".

Those will be the same rumours that were reported by the Standard diary (on the pretext of reporting on a Freedom of Information request) last week, and (in the guise of reporting on a 'row between bloggers') in earlier editions today, will they? Yes, I believe they will.

De-commissioned

2010-08-14T10:54:00.005+01:00

When I began working for the Audit Commission in 1994, the ten year-old organisation was on a roll. The investigation into Westminster City Council's gerrymandering scandal was making headlines, local authority performance indicators were being published for the first time, and reports on issues such as youth offending and regeneration seemed as critical of a tired Conservative government as they were of local authority and health service practice. With its recital of what now sound like tired or even trite mantras - 'customer focus', 'joined up government', 'evidence-based management' - the Commission was the very model of modern managerialism.

Despite this rising profile, worries persisted about the Commission's future under a Labour government. John Smith had pledged their abolition in 1992, but contact had gradually been established, first through back channels and then more openly with Frank Dobson, then shadow local government minister. Jack Dromey still referred to the Audit Commission as "the accountancy wing of the Conservative Party", but his tone became jocular rather than threatening.

Slowly, it became clear that New Labour had no intention of abolishing the Audit Commission. Far from it, the government-in-waiting wanted to expand, and radically alter, the Commission's remit. With the exception of flagrant misbehaviour, as witnessed at Westminster, the Commission's performance reporting was traditionally as dry and detached as its audit judgements. Performance indicators were hedged around by caveats about local circumstances and local discretion, and national value-for-money reports made generic recommendations, the pill often sweetened by sideswipes at the policy framework set by central government.

New Labour had other ideas. The Audit Commission would become a vital tool in the crusade to improve public services (or Stalinist control-freakery, depending on your perspective). Under the Best Value regime, then the Comprehensive Performance Assessment and Comprehensive Area Assessment regimes that replaced it (inspect-o-rrhoea?), the Audit Commission and its emissaries would sit in judgement on elected local authorities, awarding them star-ratings, or red or green flags on the basis of their performance.

The argument that the Commission was simply publishing information, allowing local people to set their own priorities and their own criteria in judging council performance, providing fuel for accountability, vanished. The man from the Audit Commission knew what was good, from Lampeter to Lambeth, and would judge local authorities against these benchmarks.

Michael O'Higgins, the Audit Commission's chief executive, spoke last week of the irony of the Commission's abolition, when local authority performance has improved (with the unspoken assumption that the Commission has been responsible for this improvement). A deeper irony still is that, if the Audit Commission had not so enthusiastically embraced a chance to operate as shock troops for the New Labour revolution, they might not today be being sacrificed on the altar of localism.

In the eye of the beholder

2010-06-23T19:52:00.004+01:00

Prince Charles' letter to the Prime Minister of Qatar, published this week, certainly captures its author's voice, veering at times into self-parody. In one faux-tentative passage, the Prince argues that traditional architecture is preferred "because it enhances all those qualities of neighbourliness, community, human-scale [sic], proportion and, dare I say it, 'old-fashioned' beauty."

The last word, underlined by hand in the letter, made me think of another man with a forceful personality, strong views on architecture, and a conviction that shallow functionalism in design can marginalise and undervalue beauty. Indeed, when undertaking a commission for the last government, this grandee complained that civil servants persistently tried to censor all mention of 'beauty' from his report.

I don't think either of them would thank me for the observation, but Prince Charles' fellow beauty-seeker is, of course, none other than Richard Rogers, the architect whose Chelsea Barracks scheme the Prince was seeking, successfully as it turned out, to derail.

Ecraser les bourgeois?

2010-06-20T15:21:00.005+01:00

It is commonplace to contrast the social mix of London with the segregation of Paris. This analysis characterises (caricatures?) Paris as a doughnut city: the centre is homogenously bourgeois, while the immigrants and the poor are relegated to the concrete banlieues on the other side of the Peripherique.

London by contrast is held to be a city which switches from elegant townhouse to high-rise council housing in a matter of yards, as a result of the combined efforts of the Luftwaffe and post-war planning. There are richer and poorer areas, but few districts are devoid of either social housing or a middle class enclave.

But perhaps that's all starting to change. Central St Giles is a garish Renzo Piano development on one of London's most historically ominous sites. The super dense development may tip its hat to the crowded tenements that once dominated, but there the resemblance ends. While 53 flats have been allocated to Circle Anglia for social rental and intermediate buy-rent, the others are apparently being marketed in the Far East, with prices starting at £500,000 for a studio, and £1 million for a two-bed flat.

What's missing is the middle - the flats that might be within the financial grasp of people on an average, or even above-average but not astronomical, salary. Central London's property market appears to have reached a condition where only the super-rich and key workers (the 21st Century's 'deserving poor'?) can afford to get their foot on the ladder. This is a 'mixed community', true, but a very odd one: just how will this blend of jetsetters, jobseekers and low-paid workers actually rub along?

Perhaps the developers (Legal and General, and Mitsubishi) are agitators, working under deep cover to foment revolution, by laying bare the inequities in society. Or perhaps it's just another of the bizarre outcomes of London's soaring land values, persistent high-end demand, and reliance on developers to provide public goods.

The illiteracy of uses

2010-06-09T19:37:00.004+01:00

Long ago, before Brick Lane became internationally-renowned home of the ironic haircut, I attended a meeting between the Mayor of London and protestors from the Spitalfields Market Under Threat (SMUT) pressure group. With the protestors, who were seeking to preserve the former wholesale market on the edge of the City of London, was florid architect Will Alsop.

They had asked Will along, they said, to demonstrate how new commercial development could co-exist with, rather than destroying, the courtyard of 19th and 20th Century buildings, by then enclosing an 'alternative' market, selling everything from vintage clothing, to dream-catchers, to decommissioned pub signs. With a straight face, Alsop unfurled his plans. Over the nondescript market buildings towered a monstrous blob on stilts. One of the bien-pensant SMUTters coughed nervously, and explained that this proposal wasn't necessarily what they were actually proposing.

Straight face aside, I wondered whether Alsop was making a wry comment about the confusion of buildings and uses in the UK planning system. What the SMUTters wanted to preserve, I sensed, was not so much the decent but nondescript market buildings, but the marginal market uses that they accommodated, a messy bulwark against bland City expansionism.

But our planning system's 'use classes' are a blunt instrument: retail is retail, and drinking establishments are drinking establishments. Planners cannot discriminate, so protestors are forced to rely on heritage arguments, in order to defend the unique and particular against the homogenous and generic. They make claims for buildings, when what they are actually talking about is character - fleeting, intangible and easly destroyed. Spitalfields Market is now redeveloped (Smithfield is the new front); while many of the market buildings were saved, and a few token market stalls remains, they feel as forlorn and denatured as in a suburban megamall.

Reading this week about the Parisian proposal to designate streets and shops for specific uses (eg, as bookshops, bakeries, butchers or tabacs), I started to wonder we could imitate the initiative. Perhaps individual shop units could be designated for 'slightly funky coffee shop not owned by Seattle-based leviathans', 'old-fashioned hardware store where you can buy nails by weight in paper bags' or 'butchers with organic meats and straw boaters'.

This type of positive discrimination is what the great estates can do; it's what Howard de Walden have sought to do (with some sucess) in Marylebone High Street. But this power seems unlikely to be granted to town halls even in our brave new world. It may be irreproachably conservative, and trendily localist, but it would be a heretical denial of free market ideology.

"We are still waiting on language"

2010-05-17T19:22:00.002+01:00

And three more direct quotes from a meeting this afternoon:

"this should be a cross-cutting bedrock"
"all the groundwork will be fully in line with the direction of travel"
"there will be clarity on what vehicles we need going forward"

This was not, needless to say, a discussion about public transport, or quarrying...

It's the stupid, economy!

2010-04-29T21:21:00.017+01:00

With the last prime ministerial debate dissolving into inchoate chattering behind me, three night thoughts about the economy:

All three parties are continuing to evade the issue of where the cleaver should fall. Assuming we believe that the present level of public sector borrowing is unsustainable (or, which is not quite the same thing, that it risks incurring the wrath of the bond markets), we are facing deep and wounding cuts to public services. All this wittering about efficiency savings, reduced bonuses and more effective procurement is marginal at best and evasive in general. And the safeguarding of the NHS and education as sacrosanct simply means that the viciousness of benefit cuts or tax rises will be so much more acute elsewhere. When people look back on this disingenuous apology for a debate, they may be angry. They would have every right to be.

Cutting public spending will hit all sorts of people, me included. But it's less clear than it used to be what the public sector is nowadays. Since 1997, the process of privatising public services has accelerated. Companies like Capita, Serco and Veolia may not be household names, but they each have public sector revenues running into billions of pounds every year; they empty our bins, clean our streets, collect our council tax and run our trains. The public-sector income of big consultancies like KPMG, Price Waterhouse and McKinsey is lesser, but nonetheless considerable. The modern state is locked into a co-dependent embrace with an ever-growing parastatal private sector. Will cutting public expenditure boost or undermine this economic interzone?

Lastly, the three candidates fell over each other to laud manufacturing industry. Fair enough, except inasmuch as these were the same people drivelling on about 'knowledge economies' and other weightless chaff only years ago. Consistency, and a modicum of dignity, are maintained by talking nowadays of the importance of science and high tech manufacturing, rather than the dirty and - by implication - 'uncreative' factories of the past. But nobody has given anything more than sentimental or affirmatory arguments as to why serious manufacturing industry should take root in the ashes that remain, after three decades of systematic and determined de-industrialisation. Absent the public sector and the former 'masters of the universe' from the world of finance, and you have to ask, What of our alleged economy remains?

They are now vying with each other to say that teachers are valuable. And the sea wet. And that fiddle music is a great accompaniment to urban bonfires. Selah.

Because I'm worth it...

2010-03-23T11:41:00.006Z

Do you ever get those days when you just want to be looked after, when a visit to a beauty salon that is the only option, when natural products must be used to create those wholesome feelings of health and natural vitality?

You do? Well, look no further. As ever, Brixton has the answer...

Hammering the quacks

2010-03-07T15:55:00.005Z

One of the more depressing things about living and working in London's less prosperous neighbourhoods is the sheer number of spiritual entrepreneurs (from every imaginable established religion, and then some) seeking to make a fast buck out of people with genuine hardship in their lives.

Today's leaflet, from Pandith Lakkshman Sastri, who operates out of the hallowed portals of Tooting Supermarket (66 Tooting High Street), offers palm- and face-reading to help with everything that life can throw at you, from the commonplace to the incomprehensible: 'Business, Money, Family problems, Children's problems Husband and Wife relation, Education, Love, Job, Marriage, Divorce, Sickness, Promotion, choice of stones, abroad etc.'

At the bottom of the flyer, the small print reads: 'All matters will be kept confidently.' Which I will certainly bear in mind, next time stone-choosing becomes an issue.

Triumph of the bland

2010-02-25T09:48:00.011Z

David Runciman's talk on the politics of three London Olympic Games at Queen Mary College last week was amusing and enlightening. In 1908, Anglo-American relations became strained - the English felt the American's habit of training was unsporting - and the organisers kept the prices high to deter dangerous crowds of the wrong sort of spectator.

In 1948, the tone was one of austerity (athletes had to hire towels if they didn't bring their own) and restraint. The malnourished English took a perverse pride in the fact that the national anthem was only heard five times (opening and closing ceremonies, and three gold medals), compared to Berlin in 1936, where Deutschland Uber Alles and Horst Wessel had rung out continuously.

The 1948 Olympics were also the last Games where medals were awarded for artistic endeavour. The quality of entries was mixed, to put it politely: no medals were awarded for music, and the sculpture that won gold was a heroically anodyne piece by Gustav Nordahl called Homage to Life (photo, right, Bengt Oberger).

Runciman compared this inoffensive couple to the heroically striving ubermenschen whose representations triumphed in Berlin in 1936. A retreat to the bland was understandable if not inevitable given the horrors of the previous 12 years. Together with an irreparable fracturing of consensus on what constitutes 'good' art, nervousness about the appropriation of sporting iconography by fascists signalled the end of art as a competitive Olympic activity.

Even today, sport-inspired art tends either to the heroic or the apologetic, to the apotheosis of man and the spirit of '36, or to mushy statements of universal brotherhood (see Invictus, though I doubt I will). The International Olympic Committee headquarters in Lausanne manages to combine both (photo, above left, IOC/Juillart). Leni Riefenstahl casts a long shadow.

Floodland

2010-02-05T19:25:00.007Z

To the right is a graphic that appeared in the Guardian last weekend, to illustrate a story about flood risk and global warming:

The larger map is pretty familiar: it sets out the flood risk that would arise from a two-metre rise in sea levels (at the upper end of projections for this century).

The smaller map, which seems to have inundated most of eastern England, is less familiar. Reading the small print, it becomes clear that this is a map of a truly cataclysmic scenario. The complete melting of the polar ice caps would release a staggering 33 million square kilometres of water into the sea, and this could result in a sea level rise in the order of 84 metres. So it's farewell to Norfolk.

But the qualifications pile up. This outcome is "very unlikely - and probably only possible many thousands of years into the future." So, like global pandemics, asteroid collisions and exploding supernova stars, this type of sea level rise is not really something we can do a great deal about now.

You have to ask why The Guardian chose to print this map. Following the failure of the talks in Copenhagen, it is very tempting - even for those of us who broadly accept the scientific consensus - to stick our heads in the ever-warming sands, declare that the problem is too monstrous to tackle, and enjoy the sunshine.

A debate in the Observer today quotes a former chair of the IPCC as saying, "Unless we announce distasters no one will listen." But conjuring cataclysms like this doesn't help; in fact, it plays into the hand of those who argue that the threat is exaggerated, or a trojan horse for a green re-engineering of society.

It's the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine)

2010-02-05T09:20:00.004Z

Browsing survivalist websites recently (don't ask), I clicked on a banner ad for Hardened Structures, and specifically for their '2012 Shelters'.

The 2012 Shelter sounds like a serious piece of kit. The website tells us: "As a specific Threat Event, the anticipated catastrophic effects resulting from 2012 are far greater than the anticipated effects from WMD’s, anarchy, climate change or any of the other specific Threat Events for which we have developed mitigation designs ... most engineers and scientists agree that for a fully protected 2012 shelter the following threats must be mitigated;

3-Bars Blast Overpressure of 45 psi
Force 10 Earthquake in successions
450 MPH winds
Extreme Gamma & Neutron attenuation from a 100 megaton air burst detonated 20 miles away
Solar Flares with 1,000,000 volt EMP
Flooding (complete submersion for 100 hours)
Extreme External Fires at 1250 F for 10 days
Magnetic Pole Shift
Radiological, Chemical and Biological Weapons
Forced Entry and Armed Assaults
12’ of snow and 10’ of rain
500 lb Hail Stones or flying debris at a speed of 100 mph"

Usually I find that ignoring TV for six weeks keeps you safely insulated from the Olympics, but some people are clearly determined to take no chances. 900 days to go, and counting.

Reality used to be a friend of mine

2010-01-28T19:50:00.003Z

Just before Christmas, an age ago in internet time, a man called David Thorne published an email exchange on his website, apparently between him and an entrepreneur called Simon Edhouse, who wanted some free graphic design for a new venture. The (cruel but very funny) exchange was an internet hit (particularly among graphic designers, who seemed all too familiar with the scenario), but Edhouse quickly denounced it as a vicious fabrication by a former friend.

Browsing around, I found Edhouse's own website, where he was facing concerted internet heckling from people who seemed unconvinced by his denials. But it also contained some of his own thoughts: "destiny is DIY" and "the map is not the territory". These curious pearls made me wonder whether perhaps Edhouse was actually a fictitious character, invented by Thorne for his own cruel amusement. Perhaps Thorne was fictitious too. They both seem to come from Adelaide, which may as well be Alpha Centauri for all I can do to verify the existence of either of them.

It reminded me of a university friend, studying philosophy and overwhelmed by cartesian scepticism, desperately gripping the lamp on his desk, seeking reassurance that it - perhaps alone in all the universe - was verifiably real. All that is solid melts into air.

Kicking against the BRICs

2010-01-23T17:31:00.005Z

Compared to the hubbub over Google's threats, media coverage of the banning of China's first 'gay pageant' was limited, but gave an interesting snapshot of something. I'm just not sure what.

The Guardian had reported on plans for the event on 10 January, with organiser Steve Zhang suggesting that police could yet shut it down. And so they did. But this seemed to be very polite repression: police were reported to have had friendly conversations with the participants, who were told that homosexuality was a 'sensitive issue'. Very different in tone to Russia, where 'gay pride' and similar events are regularly and violently broken up by police (and nationalist counter-demonstrations).

If the demonstration had been by a political opposition group, the situation would probably be reversed. Russia is a democracy, albeit a compromised and autocratic one, and opposition parties are at least tolerated. The harsh treatment of pro-democracy activists in China shows that ideological pluralism is still seen as a dangerous threat to stability. You can bet that Google searches for gay dating sites would be far easier to get past China's internet censors than phrases like 'Tiananmen Square protests'.

At which point one starts to wander dangerously close to sweeping generalisations about value systems and cultural heritage, confucianism and christianity. One culture is concerned about social cohesion and harmony, the other about personal behaviour and sin. Both can be repressive, but in different ways and to different people.

Maps and legends

2010-01-08T15:47:00.007Z

Not exactly long-awaited, but if you want to follow the London to Brighton route set out in previous posts, It should be fairly easily navigable on OS Explorer maps (numbers 146, 135 and 122).

Or, to entertain myself primarily, I have also pooterishly plotted the route on Google Maps, here:

View London to Brighton in a larger map

In the mouth a desert

2009-11-27T15:06:00.005Z

As global capitalism staggers back towards the abyss, there is a rich seam of irony in the fact that Dubai is the source of the latest barrowload of bad debt.

Dubai is a statelet with a very old-fashioned view of debt. Dickensian even. Bouncing cheques is a criminal matter there, and anecdotes are legion about newly-unemployed expats who scarper to the airport, and leave their cars with the keys in the ignition, to avoid ending up behind bars as their over-leveraged lifestyles unravel.

Meanwhile, on Nakheel's website, you wouldn't be able to see anything was wrong. Headlines focus on golf tournaments not debt defaults. The sangfroid of Drake playing bowls as the Spanish Armada approached, or the lunacy of Nero fiddling as Rome collapsed in flames?

Home to the sea

2009-10-26T20:17:00.010Z

Out of Hassocks Station, past the alternative-therapy 'Heeler Centre' (not a bad pun, apparently, but run by someone called Heeler), we followed the railway embankment south as far as Butchers Wood, then over to Clayton.

The Downs rose steeply ahead of us, the sails of the Jack and Jill windmills peeking bashfully over the sheep-filled horizon. Turning back, we could see the coloured counties, or at least Sussex, turning shades of ochre in the hazy autumn sun. Beyond the windmills, we crossed the South Downs Way, busy with walkers, dogs and horses, and skirted the edge of Pyecombe Golf Club.

We joined the Sussex Border Path as it led through a freshly ploughed field, the bare flinty earth gleaming black under wheeling seagulls.

Past the Chattri War Memorial, an incongruous Mughal-styled memorial to 53 Indian soldiers whose corpses were cremated there during the First World War, Sussex Heights and Brighton's seafront could be seen in the distance.

After a quick pint in Patcham's Black Lion, a plastic Harvester restaurant busy with squabbling families, we walked back in to Brighton on the London Road. At the south end of Preston Park, the remnants of Steve Ovett's despoiled statue provided a surreal footnote to the journey.
Stats: 11.25km, 7 miles, 2.5 hours

Fowl play

2009-10-22T17:35:00.010+01:00

Leaving Haywards Heath, my befuddled state (head-cold fog battling it out with pseudoephedrine fizz) got me serially lost down sylvian suburban streets, with his'n'hers Porsche Cayennes in front drives. Eventually, as the autumn sun broke through grey clouds, I escaped into a field of cows by Fox Hill.

From here, a curiously complicated series of footpaths led me slowly south to Wivelsfield, over handsome stiles erected by the local Monday Group. The last footpath ended in a garden populated by geese and a goat. I followed the signs to cross a small bridge over a stream, but the geese had other ideas, rushing over the bridge at me with wings aloft, hissing furiously and trying to bite me between the legs. Like heavy artillery, the goat lurked malevolently behind the front lines.

Like a cross between Horatius Cocles and their Capitoline ancestors, the birds were clearly determined to defend their territory. While pondering these irrelevant classical allusions, I cast around for a weapon: would self-defence be a mitigating factor against accusations of poaching? Did I want to carry a dead goose for the rest of the walk?

Instead, I decided to beat a hasty retreat, and walked cautiously round the edge of the garden. After a mercifully brief stretch of road (the byways of Sussex are packed with speeding SUVs and white vans, not making for easy walking), I returned to open country, passing to the east of St George's Retreat (a rapidly-expanding care home) and between the heathland and industrial buildings of Ditchling Common.

Joining the Sussex Border Path and crossing the Lewes branch of the railway, I saw a first glimpse of the South Downs in the distance. The path led into 'the Low Weald' - small fields of horses and grapes, and through a free range chicken farm. My second poultry encounter of the day was much more relaxed than the first: the chickens had obviously come to associate humans with food, so came rushing at me.

As I walked down the track, I looked back to see that I had attracted a retinue of the daft clucking creatures, reminding me of Bertrand Russell's admonition: "Domestic animals expect food when they see the person who feeds them. We know that all these rather crude expectations of uniformity are liable to be misleading. The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken."

Ditchling's narrow high street was clogged with cars, and The Bull was packed with prosperous munchers, giving the lie to the recession with their locally-sourced and exorbitantly-priced lunches. Following an old Roman Road busy with well-dressed dog walkers, I skirted Keymer, and arrived at Hassocks Station in time to catch a train under the looming Downs back to Brighton.

Stats: 8.7 miles, 14 km, 3.25 hours

My old haunts

2009-10-17T16:02:00.011+01:00

More than any other part of London, Southwark remains medieval. Its narrow streets, hard against railway embankments, retain an eldritch flavour of their history, of their ghosts, that centuries of development cannot fully erase.

Turning down Redcross Way from Union Street a few days ago, I was immediately confronted by a faded Jubilee Line extension worksite hoarding, a ghost of my own past. Beyond this, a gate was strung with faded flowers and tributes, like the scene of a truly cataclysmic road traffic accident, or the streets of New York after 9/11.

The gate (photo, left, ProfDEH) leads into Cross Bones, an uncon- secrated burial ground first identified as a 'single women's church yard' in the 16th Century. That is to say, it was a burial site for prostitutes, known as 'Winchester Geese' after the Bishop of Winchester who licensed their trade, together with other unsavoury activities (bull and bear baiting, acting etc) that were only permitted south of the River.

Cross Bones subsequently became a general paupers' burial ground, and was closed owing to overcrowding in 1853. The Jubilee Line extension works required partial excavation of the site, though only 19th Century corpses (45 per cent of them less than a year old at time of death) were recovered.

Successive attempts by Transport for London and its predecessors to develop the site have faltered in the face of local opposition. Led by a playwright called John Constable, a local community group runs monthly remembrance rituals, and an annual event at Halloween. Despite the neo-pagan/psychogeographical hokum that these seem to involve, it is touching that some people still honour the memory of what they term "the outcast dead", as the trains and lorries of the 21st Century rumble by oblivious.

Inertia creeps

2009-09-23T20:20:00.014+01:00

I was in Chicago last weekend, at an event sponsored by the Council for the United States and Italy. The conference was about the challenges of city growth - housing, transport, environmental sustainability, government - and involved people from public and private sectors, academia, the military, and non-governmental organisations.

One theme that emerged was scepticism about the ability of elected city leaders to commit to long-term change, given the short-term imperative of electoral cycles. Some of us from public sector backgrounds suggested that this may not be as much of a problem as it seemed: given the much-criticised inertia of bureaucracies, 180-degree reverses in policy were much rarer than electoral rhetoric would suggest.

Which brings me to Boris Johnson's retreat from his plans to cancel the western extension of London's congestion charging zone. Despite commissioning a fresh consultation exercise, the capital costs of redrawing the zone, and the loss of revenue that would follow, clearly seemed too onerous. You can't imagine that any mayor other than Ken Livingstone would have introduced congestion charging in 2000, but now it is in place, it looks like it's here to stay.

Similarly, Labour did little to undo the Conservative settlement of the 1980s and 1990s, with the exception of some trade union legislation, and indeed built on many of the elements that they had most strenuously opposed in opposition. And you can only wonder whether an incoming Conservative administration would undo much of the current government's programme, from ID cards to Bank of England independence, against which they have so heartily inveighed.

Inertia is a mixed blessing. I railed against it when I was younger and today my views remain largely partisan (bureaucrats can be either valiant voices for common sense or obstructive dullards, depending on context). Famously frustrating to politicians like Tony Blair, inertia does perhaps serve to dissuade incoming governments from spending too much time unstitching their predecessors' policies.

Rather than an erratic see-saw of reversals, politics becomes a relatively smooth progression of cumulative change, for good or ill, moving on slowly. Perhaps, when Tony Blair complained of "scars on his back", it was a back-handed tribute to the ability of the civil service (where nobody ever gets sacked for doing nothing) to temper change with continuity, to save us from relentless alternation.

This is conservative, to be sure, but 'conservative' as eloquently defined by Michael Oakeshott, not as cooked up in crazy-eyed think tanks: "To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss."

To the valley below

2009-09-10T19:12:00.014+01:00

Balcombe to Haywards Heath is only about two miles as the crow flies. I am not a crow, so this stage of the walk described a lazy s-shape, passing through the Ouse Valley and under the magnificent Ouse Valley Viaduct.

Leaving Balcombe south on the B2036, I escaped from the rattle of the rails down into a wooded valley swarming with pheasants, scurrying indignantly ahead of me, or squawking and rustling from the undergrowth. At the top of the valley, the landscape opened up, with a glimpse of the Viaduct in the distance. I joined the Sussex Ouse Valley Way and turned east towards the Viaduct, which emerged through a landscape that seemed almost unnaturally green in the late summer sun.

The view from the top of the Viaduct is, at any time of year, one of the highlights of the train journey from London to Brighton. Rushing past incongruous Palladian gatehouses and stone balustrades, rail passengers are treated to a panorama of timeless southern English countryside, with old brick farm buildings dotted throughout the wide and well-wooded valley, and the schools buildings of Ardingly College in the background.

Approaching the Viaduct from ground level, you become aware of the strength and grace of the structure. The 37 brick supports are hollow-centred, creating mesmerising patterns as they retreat up the slopes of the valley. Texture and depth is added by the different styles of brick that have been used to patch and maintain the Grade II-listed structure through its 170-year history - according to wikipedia, more than 100 trains a day pass over it.

Beyond the Viaduct, I took a short-cut through River's Wood, then rejoined the path, as it led through the pastel-shirted ersatz landscape of Haywards Heath Golf Club. Disorientated by its homgenised sandpits and ornamental tree-planting, I took a wrong turn and ended up on High Beach Lane, which led me into Haywards Heath past suburban villas and McMansions.

When I walked in to the Burrell Arms, opposite the station, I was grateful that I only had time for a quick half-pint. If this pub is not the worst in town, I shudder to think what its competition must be like.

Stats: 5.8 miles, 9.4km, 2 hours

For what it's Worth

2009-09-01T19:56:00.011+01:00

Footpaths are elusive at Gatwick Airport, but if you walk south past the valet parking depot, the car hire desks and the smoking sheds full of re-dosing new arrivals, you eventually find a West Sussex County Council fingerpost, looking as alien as a pennyfarthing at the TT races.

The path winds between the long-term car parks, and crosses over the internal road system, encased all the way in a wire cage, as the planes roar in overhead. As the airport sprawled, someone presumably fought for the preservation of this right of way, but it makes you feel like a perimeter guard at a high security prison. After a surprisingly long time, we cleared the airport, spotting a fox cub and a muntjac on the way, then meandered back over the motorway to Shipley Bridge.

Turning south, we followed roads and footpaths through Copthorne, then entered the western fringes of Ashdown Forest ('home', its website earnestly informs us, of Winnie the Pooh). Police signs on the gates warned of malicious damage to flora and fauna - bear-of-little-brain-baiting, perhaps, or thistle-rustling? - but the tracks through the well-managed woods were almost deserted, decorated only by piles of logs and the occasional feral club chair.

Abruptly, the forest gave way to the lawns, playing fields and golf courses of Worth School, a Catholic boarding school boasting the grandiose but grim architecture in which such institutions specialise. We were a couple of weeks away from the beginning of term, but already lawn mowing and line painting was immaculate, ready for the onslaught of a new academic year.

A thirsty diversion west through more woods led to The Cowdray, a recently refurbished pub with a sunny beer garden full of families. A slow-moving elderly lady, looking down at a toddling infant, remarked with casual menace, "If you get in my way, I will tread on you, you know." Outraged expressions all round. The Cowdray's reinvention of the club sandwich was - as reinvented club sandwiches tend to be - perfectly pleasant in itself, but not a patch on the original.

The rest of the walk to Balcombe, along the busy B2036, was functional rather than scenic. Balcombe itself was full of blackberry pickers, looking on each other with a mixture of curiosity and paranoia as they hunted down the most fruitful and accessible branches.

Stats: 9.2 miles, 14.8 km, 4 hours

Tales of antique power

2009-08-29T10:46:00.010+01:00

Another year, another scheme for redeveloping Battersea Power Station begins to wilt. The site is caught in a double bind. The listed power station (right, photo Tagishsimon) takes up so much space and requires so much investment to keep it safe, let alone equip it for re-occupation, that it is hard to make any scheme make commercial sense at the best of times.

Balancing the books requires a density of development on the rest of the site that cannot be reconciled with its poor public transport accessibility, and the costs of building new infrastructure (the most recent proposals include a spur from the Northern Line) just make marginally viable proposals more fragile still.

You could argue that the only way to bring the site into use would be to demolish the power station. That would be a shame. I have been lucky enough to visit the building, designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott and opened in 1933, and its interiors are as stunning as its looming form, if not more so. The turbine halls are elegantly tiled, and the control rooms truly magnificent. Crafted wooden fittings are surrounded by decorative wall and ceiling tiles, and bakelite switches are inscribed with the names of substations and districts. This, the interiors say, is a place where something important, and magical, takes place.

The overall impression is one of pride, pride in the modernism and progress that this temple of power once represented, a pride that can also be seen in elaborate Victorian shrines of sanitation, like Bazalgette's ornate pumping stations at Crossness and Abbey Mills (left, photo Gordon Joly).

This pride in utilities is something we have lost. As I walked through Redhill a couple of weeks ago, the contrast between the grandeur of the Royal Earlswood Hospital and the shabby incoherence of the East Surrey Hospital could not have been starker. While offices, libraries and civic centres can still win awards, it is almost as if the mundane necessities of power, health and sanitation have become embarassments, to be covered up and smothered, like a burp in polite company.

We are left with tacky trash, rendered all the more conspicuous by its artless attempts to blend in.

Walking fifty miles in their shoes?

2009-08-16T17:55:00.003+01:00

I have done some sniffing around the web to find any other accounts of walking from London to Brighton, and have found very little. Two minor gems: this marvellous Pathe film of a London-Brighton walking race in 1955, and - even more eccentrically - these photographs of Mademoiselle Florence, a lady who walked from London to Brighton on a ball in 1903. Respect.

Trains, planes and automobiles

2009-08-16T12:19:00.010+01:00

Redhill is a good place to leave. I had arrived by train from Victoria, where I saw a family of recently arrived tourists (Iranian, I think) trying to collect the necessary change to use the public loos (£1.50 for the five of them). It felt deeply shaming that this chiselling approach to basic human needs was to be one of their first experiences of the UK.

Back to Redhill, where a bit of fancy footwork along the A25 took me away from the shopping mall that appeared to have replaced the town centre, and to the south. Redhill's former 'asylum for idiots', the Royal Earlswood Hospital has - like so many of London's green belt asylums - been redeveloped as housing. The main building is imposing and impressive (you can see it from the railway line), as befits an establishment that was the residence of the Queen Mother's nieces for many secret years. It is now mocked by the cheap pastiche that surrounds it, buildings crammed together like Monopoly houses. There is still a gate, presumably to keep people out rather than in nowadays, though it's a pretty moot point.

From alongside the hospital (and leading past the newer East Surrey Hospital and the isolated housing estate (perhaps a 'New Village'?) of Whitebushes), a slightly monotonous bridleway and cycle track takes you south to Horley, staying a fairly consistent field's width away from the railway line. In several places, what was marked on the OS map as fields has been taken over by new housing estates. Many of these can be seen from the train. They do not look much more impressive close to.

The Farmhouse, just on the northern edge of Horley, lies alongside one of these estates, but has a good garden for a pint (and a magnificent 'smoking pavilion', in which the landlord has drolly made space for a bar "should the Government...ban alcohol in pubs in future"). Continuing clockwise round the town, I made for Thunderfield Castle, which looked more impressive on the map than it did with reality: a caravan site surrounded by a redundant moat of oily, stagnant water.

Modern buildings down these small back streets and bridleways were far more effectively secured, with electric gates and high hedges protecting the privacy of large houses and large cars.

Clear of Horley, the roar of the motorway grows again as you approach the M23 spur to Gatwick, this time mixed with the intermittent rattling of trains and the keening whine of aircraft. Cows in the fields alongside seem curiously nonchalant, as I creep through the din and the brambles to the airport.

Stats: 2.5 hours, 12.75km, 8 miles

I fell in love with the beautiful highway

2009-08-15T12:47:00.011+01:00

"The journey of 1,000 miles starts with a single step"

I spend so much time travelling between London and Brighton, that I thought it would be worth walking the route, if only to understand better the familiar but always half-glimpsed landscape as it flashes past the window.

Coulsdon South was the starting point. I wanted the trip to be more honest than scenic, but trudging through Streatham, Norbury, Purley and all points in between seemed to be an exercise in unnecessary masochism. A few yards from the station, the path across Farthing Downs takes you to the top of the North Downs, the hillsides dotted with forests in one direction and suburban villas in another. The road narrows and continues down towards Chaldon, with huge SUVs squeezing past each other, rushing to conclude the slightly furtive business that seems to dominate London's fringes.

I wandered off the road to try to follow a path through Devilsden Wood, but quickly got confused by too many paths rather than two few, almost all of them marked 'Happy Valley Nature Trail'. That wasn't what I wanted - it sounded far too urban and didactic for my mood - but it seemed to have taken over all signage, like Japanese Knotweed smothering native species.

I returned to Ditches Road pretty near where I had left it, dodged some more SUVs and the occasional tractor, then walked past Chaldon's 11th Century Church (no camera this time, but I hope to remedy that in future stages). Past a couple of farms and then the most fantastic vista over the great closerleaf of the M23-M25 junction, with the M23 snaking through misty skies to the South.

Motorways may be bad in all sorts of ways (planet, health etc), but watching them twining together through wooded valleys, you are reminded what beauties of engineering they are too. Walking through cornfields down to the road, the roar of the traffic growing steadily more insistent, you feel like an archaeologist or an alien, unearthing something at once thrilling and abstruse.

A path passed under the M23, through Merstham, cut off like a sandbank between two rivers, then over the M25. Following the bank round above the junction, I passed more intriguing edge of city developments (razorwire and daubed signs - 'GUARD DOGS LOSE AT ALL TIME! KEEP OUT!!!').

Nature reserves indicated the sites of past gravel pits, and the path eventually emerged at Nutfield Marsh. The Inn on the Pond was exactly the pub I didn't want to find for lunch: restaurant-focused, with precious little bar service, and an interior that looked like it had been selected by an auto-gastropub programme. Very sorry, very Surrey.

The chef cites "Gordon Ramsay, Jamie Oliver and Thomas Keller of Napa Valley’s ‘French Landry’ [sic] restaurant fame as his food influences". I had a ham baguette, in which few of these influences were discernible. It's a bit like me saying that this account is inspired by Patrick Leigh Fermor. It may be true, but it has no bearing on the quality of my prose.

From there, the idea of walking into Redhill, past the huge new housing estates being built in gravel pits that I had seen from the train, seemed too depressing a prospect, so I took a slightly woozy route across fields to Nutfield itself, then a further stroll (downhill again) onto South Nutfield, where a train arrived, miraculously, as I did.

Stats: 3.5 hours, 13.25km, 8.25 miles

re-dac-tor

2009-06-25T16:18:00.003+01:00

'Redact' is one of those ugly words (like 'resile') that seems to have insinuated itself into everyday speech without anyone noticing, let alone objecting.

Since 2005, redaction has been used in the public sector to describe the act of obliterating any interesting, sorry I mean 'sensitive', information in response to Freedom of Information requests, usually by use of a black marker pen. It was the publication of MPs' expenses (or rather the publication of Mondrian-esque blocks of black ink) that allowed the word to break out of its status as a piece of public sector jargon, and enter the real world.

The dictionary (Chambers 21st Century) defines 'redact' as 'to edit; to put (text) into the appropriate literary form', and traces its use back to the Latin redigere - to bring back. It is an irony worthy of Orwell that a word associated with tidying up for publication is now used to signify censorship and the suppression of information.

Poets, politicians, beauty queens and cooks

2009-05-21T18:23:00.006+01:00

I don't seem to have put much up here recently. Normal service will be resumed presently.

In the meantime, here is one of Nick Asbury's 'corpoetics' - poetry assembled from the airy and conceited twaddle that infests corporate websites:

KPMG
I am strong.
I am vibrant.
I am committed to a vision.

I am tremendous.
I am quality.
I will lead people to excellence.

I am delighted.
I am respected.
I am very greatly valued.

What am I?
I am the best.

Reproduced without any permission, but please go and buy the book, and enoy other features on the Asbury blog, such as distinguishing the names of Fall songs from tax avoidance scams. Harder than you think.

Sign of the times

2009-03-23T15:59:00.005Z

Like the first cuckoo, frogspawn or daffodil, dire warnings of anarchists hijacking peaceful anti-capitalist protests seem to come round earlier each year.

This year's star turn is one Alessio Lunghi, who is alleged to be proposing 'black bloc' tactics (whereby protestors dress identically to avoid identification) for the G20 Summit at the end of this month.

So far, so business as usual What is interesting this year is that, at the time of writing, these pernicious anarchists and their proposals to seize the ill-gotten gains of the capitalist system, appear to be getting a fair degree of support from on-line commentators in the Evening Standard (not known to be a house journal for the global resistance movement).

The main debate seems to be whether precipitating state repression and perhaps revolution through these tactics is appropriate, not whether the call to 'RECLAIM THE MONEY, storm the banks and send them packing' is right or wrong in itself.

Pipeline at the gates of dawn

2009-02-21T16:21:00.006Z

Apart from some lurking images that would give Freud a field day, this email that I received at work is thoroughly baffling:

'Over the past week, each Directorate has been requested to send the Corporate PMO updates for the Pipeline Tracker tool. This tool ensures visibility of all projects that are expected to pass through the Gateways at any given time.

'This is an ongoing process requiring continual maintenance and review to ensure the Tracker is accurate and reliable.

'The Corporate PMO needs to identify representatives from each Directorate to act as a Pipeline Champion, and this will be initiated next week.

'Please can you nominate these representatives ASAP.

'Thank you for your cooperation.'

I'd love to help (probably), but I really don't have the faintest idea what I am meant to co-operate with.

Burj Babel

2009-02-14T09:15:00.021Z

A phantasmagorical icon symbolising mankind's folly and hubris...

...and a painting by Breughel.

Nothing can stop them?

2009-02-07T12:22:00.006Z

It's good to see that Saint Etienne have offered to write a song for London 2012. SE are the quintessential London band, and What Have You Done Today, Mervyn Day? their unsentimentally-filmed elegy for the Lower Lea Valley's vanishing grimescape is well worth watching.

But, based on the evidence to date, their bid to craft a 2012 anthem is doomed to disappointment. From Barcelona to Beijing, understatement has rarely been an Olympic theme. London's bid was buoyed along by mannered M-People caterwhauling, and our contribution to the closing ceremony at Beijing was a faintly embarassing attempt to distill the essence of 'Cool Britannia' (remember that?), while ticking appropriate boxes. Red double-decker bus, as seen in establising shots in every film from Goldfinger to 28 Days Later? Check. Old white man from once-important rock band? Check. Inoffensive young black woman from talent show to counterbalance said rock dinosaur? Check. Global brand/footballer type person? Check.

I hope I'm wrong, and there may still be a lot of suprises before the 2012 opening ceremony, but I am afraid that Saint Etienne's music, while not always my cup of tea (too winsomely Heavenly Records, if you know what I mean), is too subtle, too particular, too crafty and crafted, to fit into the bizarre, homogenised world of Olympic culture and bombast.

World gone wrong

2009-02-06T20:39:00.008Z

There are all sorts of reasons why I haven't typed anything here for a few weeks. One reason is that I try to write with some basic level of insight or understanding, and things are falling apart in the global system at such a dizzying pace that is hard to see what is happening, let alone make any sense of it all.

There's something else too. Every time I start typing something about the shrill and intolerant outrage that seems to dominate debate at the moment, I realise I am sounding like a Daily Mail writer, protesting about 'political correctness gone mad'. And this is not a good sound. If you sleep with a dog you get fleas, true, but sometimes that's the only place to sleep.

This week has been particularly rich in its craziness. Jonathon Ross making jokes about sex with old people (and the grand-daughters of old people) was merely a warm-up act to Gollygate. Now, Carol Thatcher does not seem like the sort of person I'd like as a neighbour. I can only cringe as I imagine her crass and self-righteous air of martyrdom as she refused to 'kowtow to political correctness', by apologising for her singularly oafish and offensive remarks. But this can't make it right to ban her from the airwaves.

Jeremy Clarkson is another person that I wouldn't want to spend much time with (though Top Gear is a guilty pleasure), but it is hard to see how referring to Gordon Brown as a 'one-eyed Scottish idiot' is so offensive to all partially-sighted people, let alone an entire nation, unless they are embarassed to be associated with the Prime Minister.

This fractious and factitious culture of complaint (to borrow the title of Robert Hughes' prescient book) is reducing a once-great institution to a punch-drunk pulp, incapable of distinguishing morality from manufactured outrage, or helping the hungry from helping Hamas. To mangle another Yeats line, the BBC lacks all conviction; its viewers are full of passionate intensity.

We are all going to hell in a handcart (as I believe is the the traditional closing sentence of such rants).

Living in a box

2009-01-19T22:07:00.005Z

I watched the ponderously-titled 'Big Chef Takes On Little Chef', wherein Heston Blumenthal seeks to revive Little Chef, with a creeping and dismal sense of familiarity.

The show pivots on an initially contrived, but subsequently all-too-real clash between Blumenthal and Little Chef boss Ian Pegler. The problem is something like this: Blumenthal sees his role as recovering the reputation of a British classic and, for all his culinary curiosity, seems to nurse a genuine interest in and affection for the traditions of British cooking.

Pegler, however, seems to view Blumenthal as a performing food monkey, who will bring 'blue skies thinking' to bear on Little Chef's tired menus (but doesn't need to worry his little head with anything like business models).

I don't know much about catering, but my experiences on the fringe of architecture suggest that the clients who demand wacky, iconic designs for buildings with a 'wow factor' are those least likely to understand the careful, pains-taking accretion of change that the best architects can orchestrate. The neophiles want the glamour and the buzz, but are too superficial to consider the sweat and the craft that underpins it.

They want 'thinking outside of the box' (Ian Pegler came up with this with a mere two minutes of TV programme to go). To which my architect friend Mark has the only sensible response: "Err, I don't really think in a box."

All meat on the same bone

2008-11-03T11:03:00.003Z

It's easy to feel remote from your fellow-countrymen. I felt like a visitor from another planet when the nation went into collective mourning for Princess Diana, and I did again last week, as tens of thousands of people began baying for the blood of radio presenters.

Initially I felt irritated by 'Manuelgate'; the furore seemed like a distraction from 'real' news, like the continuing collapse of global capitalism. Then I realised that these were actually the same story: while regulators dozed, infantile over-paid idiots with egos the size of counties caused havoc with their reckless speculation. Both disasters started out small, noticed only by the aficionados, but rapidly snow-balled to become national (if not global) crises.

To stretch the comparison, we are now assured that there will be a retreat from risk-taking. Bankers will no longer trade arcane and spectral financial instruments, but will return to their 'boring' core business of offering punters somewhere to keep their money (which they can lend out to other punters). Similarly, BBC radio hosts will have to find something interesting or amusing to say between playing records (which doesn't necessarily involve prank calls, rude words or sex with burlesque stars).

A retreat from risk may seem reasonable, especially after the turmoil we have witnessed in recent months, but slipping back into stagnation, culturally and financially, does not seem very appealing either. Are we even capable of finding a happy medium, between stodgy and stifling conformity on the one hand, and the unconstrained exuberance of adrenaline-charged nutters on the other? It's too early to tell, but the omens are hardly promising.

From goose to snake

2008-10-14T10:11:00.007+01:00

Watching Newsnight's 'trial' to examine who was to blame for the near-collapse of global capitalism last night, I could only wonder at the sheer quantity of bad faith on display.

The programme began with the results of a telephone survey, showing that the vast majority of the public blamed speculation in particular or banks in general for their irresponsibility, with s smaller proportion blaming the government, and five per cent each blaming regulators and the borrowing public.

The various 'accused' explained why it was not their fault. Paul Mason, the usually sensible Newsnight Economics Editor, talked in horror-struck tones of bankers being motivated to lend recklessly by the "personal enrichment" that could follow (as opposed to the altruism that usually prevails in financial services), and Will Hutton lambasted banks for not unilaterally cutting back their remuneration to a level that could be described as sane (and would no doubt lead to a swift leakage of skilled personnel).

So, the mess we're in is all a result of these evil institutions, which apparently operate in an entirely parallel universe from the rest of us? No. The simple truth, however unpalatable, is that - whenever we have rejoiced in cheap mortgages, easy credit card transfers or stockmarket gains - we have added air to the bubble. We may wriggle to avoid blame (and everyone else involved is, so why not?), but most of us were complicit in the system.

But now, less than a year after we were worrying about the terrible implications of asking rich people to pay tax, when all the talk was of killing geese that lay golden eggs, we stand astonished that financial institutions have been playing as fast and loose as they can, in order to maximise their profits.

Perhaps it's because I am a child of the Thatcher years, but I can't find it in my heart to expect capitalist institutions to be anything other than ruthlessly - and even recklessly - self-interested. You may not like it (and I don't much), but it's the world in which we live. As Michael Foot recently observed (a footnote to this), there was an alternative, but we chose a different path 25 years ago.

I'm reminded of Al Wilson's Northern Soul classic, The Snake: a kindly woman takes in and looks after a snake that is dying of cold. Recovered, the snake duly bites her. As the venom takes hold, the woman complains of how her hospitality has been repaid, but the snake is having none of it:

"Oh shut up, silly woman", said the reptile with a grin.
"You knew darn well I was a snake before you took me in!"

Glas at least half full

2008-09-19T22:35:00.005+01:00

You have no reason to be interested, but I'm in two minds about Glasvegas.

There's a lot to loathe. Songs about missing children, stabbings, playground fights and absent fathers suggests an unhealthy level of lachrymose. To be blunt, it sounds like the laddish, beer-spilling, tearful sentimentalism reminiscent of Oasis. And I don't mean the good bits of Oasis.

But there's a lot to love too. The music - feral, echoing drums, churning guitar chops, and full 'wall-of-sound' production - is curiously compelling. James Allan's vocal delivery proves this heady mix. His voice lilts, raps and yelps, in proper Scottish ('Flowers and football tops' sounds somehow less trite when rendered as 'Flou-aas 'nd fitba torps'). At times, his words spill out on the off-beat, like some anguished mixture of the Proclaimers and Eminem.

And the lyrics have the capacity to surprise. 'Geraldine' - which starts out sounding like a love song but ends up as an ode to a social worker - is a one-trick pony, but this nag rocks like a Lipizzaner. There aren't enough people hymning social workers. These are people who undertake one of the hardest jobs in the world, perpetually making judgements that could result in their demonisation as little Hitlers or negligent liberals. They hold the physical and mental health of some of our most vulnerable citizens in their hands. They deserve more songs.

Legless at Glasto

2008-07-04T08:14:00.003+01:00

Newspaper coverage of last weekend's Glastonbury Festival suggests a new parlour game. In recent years, the press have picked up on a few defining features of Glastonbury: it's quite muddy, the sanitary facilities leave something to be desired, there are young people there, some of them are dressed oddly, many of them take drugs. Oh, and there's some music too.

So, the obvious response is to cast round for the journalist least likely to enjoy this unique mixture of charms, and send them out there. Last year the Guardian sent tent-hating Charlie Brooker, this year it was veteran columnist Alexander Chancellor. The Telegraph followed bearded Westminster mystic Christopher Howse with a smartly-tied parliamentary sketch writer Andrew Gimson.

The Daily Mail, however, possibly won, by sending whiney fashionista Liz Jones. Unlike the others, all of whom wrote variations on "I enjoyed it despite everything", Jones appears to have had an authentically miserable time (even if some cast doubt on whether her tent was actually there).

So, here's the game. Who should the newspapers send next year? Anna Wintour? Brian Sewell? The Duchess of Devonshire? Nominations welcome.

In praise of indifference

2008-05-31T13:56:00.004+01:00

Last week, I visited a friend who now lives in a medium-sized Midlands town. He'd been in London a few weeks earlier, he told me, at a party. Later in the evening, with a few other fairly intoxicated late-30s types, he'd ended up in a drum-and-bass club in Islington.

He was amazed at how little attention this frazzled group attracted, despite being the oldest people there by about fifteen years. It would have been very different in his home town, and not in a particularly positive way.

I started to say something about London being 'inclusive' and then stopped myself. I've been writing too many public sector policy documents. The people in that club weren't being inclusive; they had just erected screens of privacy around themselves and their friends. Unless and until the newcomers did something outrageous - stripping, starting fights, lighting cigarettes - they were invisible.

Tonight, in Brixton, in Brick Lane, in Soho, people from all ethnicities, nationalities, sexualities and classes will gather to enjoy a Saturday night out. They will be in the same places, but they won't be together in any real sense.

Big cities like London may have weak 'social capital', to borrow the concept popularised by Robert Putnam in 'Bowling Alone', but they are also places where an astonishing variety of people manage to live (for the most part peacefully) in close proximity to others with whom they have little in common. In the urban context, strong communities can be exclusive and antagonistic, as the murderous turf wars of London gangs illustrate.

Outside the world of well-meaning platitude, Londoners do not spend an enormous amount of time "celebrating diversity". Rather, we are indifferent to difference, preserving privacy in the crowd.

The age of change?

2008-05-02T11:31:00.001+01:00

The accursed power which stands on Privilege
(And goes with Women, and Champagne, and Bridge)
Broke - and Democracy resumed her reign
(Which goes with Bridge, and Women and Champagne).

Hilaire Belloc

Personality politics

2008-04-28T19:33:00.002+01:00

London voters will now have received the candidate leaflet for Thursday’s mayoral election. Reading some of the policies in the document, you wonder whether to laugh or cry. Among the many powers that the Mayor of London does not have are the power to stop immigration, to pull troops out of Iraq, to declare St George’s Day a national holiday, to promote marriage, or to insist all employers pay the London Living Wage.

But the London mayoralty is not really about policy. Try as they might, Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone are hard-pushed to find serious areas of disagreement: pledging to "consult residents...on whether we should keep the Western [congestion charge] extension", as Johnson has promised, is hardly an ideological rallying call.

The London Mayor is primarily a city manager: he or she needs to be able to represent the capital, to strike deals, to make things work better. This means having a clear idea of what London needs, and the political smarts to be able to lobby, haggle and argue with a jealous central government to get it. It’s personality politics, but it’s far from trivial.

This is where a difference begins to emerge between the two front-runners. Ken Livingstone has secured more powers for the Mayor, commitment to Crossrail, and billions of pounds of investment to fund the London 2012 Games and legacy. Admittedly this has been a Labour mayor working with a Labour government, but the relationship has not always been an easy one.

An incumbent always has the advantage of pointing to his record (though Livingstone's opponents have found plenty of ammunition there too). But some of the signals sent out by the Boris Johnson campaign are worrying. While Livingstone’s inner circle of advisors are not people who feel particularly at home in the Labour Party headquarters, Johnson’s campaign has been closely managed by some of his party’s top strategists, from Lynton Crosby to Nick Boles.

In addition, some newspapers have pointed to Johnson as a poster-boy for socially-liberal cameronite conservatism, a one-man vanguard for the coming general election. Johnson is insisting that he is his own man (just as Steve Norris did in previous elections). But it is hard to see in him the same cussedly independent streak, and willingness to denounce his ‘comrades’, that has endeared Livingstone to so few people in his own party and, at least in previous elections, to so many people in London.

Whatever policies the mayoral candidates espouse, the test of their mettle will be how they deal with government. Whether the government in question is Conservative or Labour should be almost immaterial. The capital needs a Mayor whose interests lie in securing the best for London, not in letting City Hall be used as a second front in Westminster’s wars.

There should be a law against us

2008-04-11T14:28:00.001+01:00

Today's story, of a teenage boy who badly burnt himself in an un-staffed tanning salon, only merited a few lines in most papers, but one comment offered a sharp insight into the state of modern capitalism.

Asked about the unfortunate incident, salon owner Steve James said that he could not afford to have staff on duty all the time if he was to remain competitive. He said: “I’m really disappointed this has happened. We are not operating illegally. If laws were passed to make all salons staffed all the time it would solve the problem.”

It is worth pausing over this statement. Mr James does not seek to defend his business practices on any grounds apart from their legality and the need to remain competitive. Indeed, in calling for legal changes, he implicitly acknowledges that, without tougher regulation, salons like his will operate in an irresponsible manner. In effect, he is saying: “There should be a law against us.”

You could hardly ask for a more damning indictment of contemporary capitalism. In an era of global and local competition, businesses cannot afford to let any moral considerations to dull their competitive edge. Conscientious entrepreneurs are cornered, and end up actively seeking regulation by the state, as their only defence against a relentless descent to the bottom line.

Consumer pressure, on sweated labour for example, can act as a gentle inhibitor of the worst practices, but shareholders will swiftly punish any working practices that raise costs (without a parallel boost to profits). Codes of conduct and self-regulation offer only uneasy stand-offs, which hold for as long as their least scrupulous member.

There is an irony here. After years of rolling back the state, building bonfires of red tape and so forth, businessmen like Steve James see state regulation as the only thing that can rescue them from the callous consequences of relentless competition.

Civilisation under attack!

2008-04-10T15:31:00.006+01:00

Under a great headline ('Pranks cannot resist the brilliance of Olympic sacred fire'), the People's Daily has this to say about the Olympic torch farrago (my italics):

Many netizens issued a warning. The few Tibet independence elements have a wishful thinking. The Olympic torch does not belong to China alone, but belong all the more to the world. Tibet independence elements now stand in the opposite to the peace-loving people across the world, and their evil deeds are sure to be subjected to denunciations by people worldwide.

The Olympic sacred fire is a vital, important symbol of human values with respect to the modern Olympic Games. Every torch relay represents a spread of human civilization. It is precisely because of this sense that people worldwide have all along regarded the Olympic torch relay as a lofty, sacred ceremony....So any deeds to interfere with and sabotage the Olympic sacred fire constitutes not only a blaspheme of the Olympic spirit but a grave challenge to the human civilization.

And I thought it was just a crappy outsize cigarette lighter, and an excuse for a bit of traditional western argy-bargy....

de Pfwaffl

2008-04-09T08:24:00.004+01:00

Boris Johnson was a sad sight on the Newsnight debate last night. Like a whipped cur, he shrank back, avoided saying anything, and cast around for fences to sit on.

Would he get rid of the western extension to the congestion charge? Well, yes. Or maybe no. "I don't think it's working, but I'm in favour of consultation. I will abide by what the people say." There are several problems here, apart from sheer issue-ducking. Consultation is not a decision-making deliberative process; it is a way of seeking public views on policies being proposed by politicians. It attracts only interested parties, and cannot confer a mandate. That's what elections are for.

It was interesting comparing this triangulated guff with the talk given by Jaime Lerner, former mayor of Curitiba in Brazil, about ten days ago. Asked why he had moved so quickly to pedestrianise Rua de Flores (the project was completed in three days), Lerner replied that, once a decision was taken, it should be implemented fast to avoid self-doubt and bureaucratic obstruction and, most importantly, to prevent the whole discussion from starting again. Mayors rule. Or at least, if they don't, they have no place being mayors.

But Alexander Boris de Pfwaffl Johnson was not finished. He had more issues to dodge, and those issues were going to be dodged. How much would scrapping bendy buses cost? Less than replacing them with hybrid buses. Was the Mayor paid enough, too much or too little. Hard to tell.

You could not imagine a greater gift for Livingstone and Paddick. Against this mop-topped embodiment of evasive action, they could hardly look anything less than decisive and statesmanlike.

Maoist managerialism

2008-03-31T12:48:00.003+01:00

Mao and Stalin are rarely cited as management gurus, but today's announcement that 6,000 civil servants have been selected to act as "special agents" of the cabinet secretary Sir Gus O'Donnell, with a remit to "give their bosses a hard time" if they don't push reform hard enough, suggests that their influence lives on.

Mass mobilisation by cadres of young zealots was a popular technique for both of the great communist tyrants: Stalin's purges in the 1930s were often fueled by workers' denunciations of their bosses, and the Red Army cadres who led the Cultural Revolution were chosen for their youth and commitment to cleansing the party.

Of course, you can't really compare what Sir Gus is proposing with the horrors of those regimes, but mass mobilisation is undoubtedly a popular tool in seeking to enforce change in the face of perceived inertia within a monolithic public sector. In a previous generation, John Major rtied to do something similar through his much-mocked Citizen's Charter initiative: unleashing the forces of consumers against remote and unaccountable service providers. Rather disturbingly, the wikipedia entry for the Charter even refers to "taking measures to cleanse and motivate civil service".

To see ourselves as others see us...

2008-03-29T08:52:00.003Z

Following a shaky and inauspicious start, the Olympic Torch is on its way round the world (or 'Journey of Harmony', to use official Olyspeak). On 6 April, the Torch will arrive in London. What sort of city will it find? According to the official torch relay website, quite an alarming one.

London, the website tells us, was founded by Roman Celts, but then burnt to the ground by Boudicca in the Seventh Century, the first of a veritable catalogue of calamities. The capital grew to become “an important commercial and social centre” in the Seventeenth Century, “however all was not well”. The Great Plague devastated the population and “London simmered under the smell of death” until cleansed by the Great Fire (which also destroyed four fifths of the city).

Pausing for breath, London had a chance to rebuild itself, but despite the best efforts of John Nash the city quickly became overcrowded by people and sewage. Jospeh Bazalgette’s sewage system rescued London from cholera, only for the city’s skyline to be “re-arranged” by the bombing raids of the Blitz. Post-war re-construction seemed for a moment to put the city back on an even keel, before the London Fog descended to kill thousands, “adequately being nicknamed the ‘Foggy City’.” Welcome to London.

There are a number of ways of reading this narrative, which seems to have been assembled from a combination of visits to the London Dungeon, the grimmer sections of 1066 and All That, and perhaps some briefing from the French tourist authorities. One can simply enjoy someone else’s perspective: the website also gives some culinary information – toad-in-the-hole is “not as strange as it seems”, and afternoon tea has declined “as life has taken on a faster pace”.

More seriously, one might see, within this tale of woe, sewage, pestilence and fog, a veiled rebuke from China: “Do not criticise our degraded environment, our polluted rivers, the smog that hangs heavy over Hong Kong. You too have been here, and not that long ago either.”

Another reading is perhaps more optimistic. The website doesn’t need to talk up London in the way that it does the beauty of Almaty. “Everybody knows” that London is a mess, with a legacy of poxy people, chaotic architecture and noxious air. But it is still London, a serious city. Who'd visit for their health? In the guise of a warning, this gruesome pen portrait pays London a sly compliment.

Sacred flame of guff

2008-03-25T11:18:00.002Z

The slightly shaky start to the Beijing 2008 Olympic Torch Relay yesterday also marked the beginning of an important competition: the quest for the most sonorous and meaningless Olympic slogan.

'Light the passion, share the dream' is a worthy first contender. Its words are entirely interchangeable, with each other and with pretty well any other Olympic word: Light the dream, share the gold, Dream the passion, share the light, Dream the gold, share the goal, Share the athlete, dream the goal, etc, etc, etc.

While on the torch-relay, it's good to read this breathless account of the feelings of the 'high priestess' (an actor called Maria Nafpliotou).

More to follow. Much, much more.

Bedfellows make strange politics

2008-03-20T14:21:00.003Z

Amidst the second wave of Gilligantics (I think one can describe the man in question as having waves), the mayoral candidates and their proxies are setting out their pitches and sharpening their knives.

Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson have, at one level, the same aim: they want the voters to take Boris Johnson seriously. Ken Livingstone has always emphasised the serious (and in his view seriously worrying) core behind Boris's bumblingly benign facade. Monday's poll showed that he needs to persuade wavering Labour party voters that a Johnson victory is a real possibility, and not a pretty one either.

So the two main candidates are locked in a p0-faced struggle for seriousness, a dullness decathlon (enough alliteration, ed.). Hence Livingstone's exclamations that "this is not Big Brother" and references to 'dog whistle' racism, hence Gordon Brown's craw-sticking emphasis on the serious nature of the Mayor's role, hence Jonathan Freedland's predictions of the decline of western civilisation in the case of a Johnson victory, hence Johnson's failure to say or do anything with a shred of wit or interest for several days.

Meanwhile, on the fringes, tactical alignments are being forged. Nick Cohen declares, with a hint of self-importance but also a grain of truth, that lefties should vote LibDem: if Brian Paddick comes third, his voters' second preferences may split equally between Johnson and Livingstone (or even favour Johnson as they did in Monday's poll), hence securing a Conservative victory. But if Livingstone comes third, his second preferences will almost all go to Paddick (errr, except those that Livingstone has already told to vote Green), hence securing a victory for Paddick.

The maths work, but the prospect of this level of switch away from Livingstone looks remote. That said, if the drip-drip-drip of insinuation and accusation continues, anything could happen.

Choices, choices

2008-03-18T17:48:00.004Z

The London mayoral election model - essentially a two-round voting system (like that used for the French president) compressed into one vote - is a wondrous thing. YouGov's latest poll, commissioned by the Evening Standard and published on Monday, looks like pretty bad news for Ken Livingstone on the surface. Underneath the surface, if you look at the full poll report, it looks a lot worse.

To take the bad news first, the poll places Boris Johnson clearly in the lead with 49 points, with Livingstone on 37 and Brian Paddick on 12. To win, a candidate needs more than 50 per cent of the votes, once minority candidates have been ruled out and their electorate's second preferences taken into account. Johnson's lead puts him in sniffing distance of that overall majority.

However, unlike previous polls commissioned in January and February, this poll also asked voters for their second preferences. This is where the news starts getting worse for Livingstone. Barring a dramatic change in fortunes, Paddick will be eliminated and his votes (like those of Greens, BNP and the rest) will be redistributed. 41 per cent of those who declared their intention to vote for Paddick first would give their second vote to Johnson, compared to 34 per cent to Livingstone. In other words, 'Anyone But Ken' is a stronger rallying cry for Lib Dems than 'Anyone But Boris'.

There are other interesting (or worrying) details in the poll. One is the way that voting intention breaks down by party loyalty. Unsurprisingly, 87 per cent of Conservatives plan to vote Johnson. Much more surprisingly, so do 21 per cent of Labour supporters. Johnson even gets a tactical 33 per cent of Lib Dems (compared to 28 per cent for Livingstone and 38 per cent for their own candidate). In other words, not only is Livingstone proving unappetising to tactically-minded Lib Dems, he only has 68 per cent of his own core vote.

It's interesting to contrast this with the situation in 2000, when rebel Livingstone probably garnered support from across the political spectrum. Now, he is struggling just to get his own vote out: 25 per cent of Labour voters (excluded from the numbers above) said that they would not vote, or don't know how they will vote.

Bringing those 'don't knows' and defectors back in to the fold (and out to vote) will be critical to a Livingstone win, and the campaign proper has only just begun. The electorate may be gently chiding him through this poll rather than expressing settled intentions, and the core Labour vote may yet balk at Boris. But this doesn't look good.

Parklife

2008-03-18T09:34:00.005Z

It's hard to get a sense of the scale of London's Olympic Park. 270 acres is the size of about 135 football pitches, to use the official journalistic unit of measurement (though, apparently, football pitches also differ in size). This is not one park, but a whole new network of new green spaces in one of the most built up and complex areas of London.

Yesterday, to accompany the announcement of the Park's designers, London 2012 issued some material about the character and content of the Park after 2012. The plans are starting to take shape: there will be areas of woodland, open space for events, hills to challenge walkers and cyclists, and a 'One Planet Pavilion' to encourage environmental responsibility.

I think the Park will be incredible, but this is the first time that I have ever considered a landscape design to be bossy. This Park is not going to let us alone: it will be telling us to take more exercise, to recycle more, to appreciate native trees, to run, to cycle, to jump, to lose weight. Where's the space for more leisurely activities - for lazing, for smoking, for drinking, for kissing? Will the Park tell us to pack a healthier picnic, to watch out for our units, to practice safe sex? I wouldn't rule it out.

We can expect more homilies as the 2012 Games draw nearer. The quasi-spiritual wing of the Olympic movement is fluent in the international language of pious eyewash: children are the future, cleanliness is next to godliness, mens sana in corpore sano, we don't own the planet we are just borrowing it from our children (or is that Patek Philippe watches?), citius altius fortius, now wash your hands.

It's at times like these, to paraphrase the Beck song, that the IOC makes me want to smoke crack.

Just 'so'

2008-03-12T17:21:00.004Z

It's the small words that are the most difficult.

I've been slightly eccentrically mulling over the meaning of the word 'so' for the past few days. It seems capable of meaning almost anything. Dictionary.com gives more than 30 possible uses from adverbial uses indicating extent or manner ("so cold", "do it so"), to use as a conjunction signifying intent or result ("he seemed to be successful, and so he was"), to a pronoun indicating proximity ("nine or so").

The most common meaning in every day speech is perhaps least explored: "so, I was walking down the street", "so, how are you?", "so, what next?" Cambridge Advanced Learners Dictionary explores this more colloquial use, suggesting that 'so' can begin a sentence:
1. to indicate a connection it with something that has been said or has happened previously;
2. as a way of making certain that you or someone else understand something correctly;
3. to refer to a discovery that you have just made;
4. as a brief pause (sometimes to emphasize what you are saying);
5. before you introduce a subject of conversation that is of present interest; or
6. to show that you agree with something that someone has just said, but you do not think that it is important.

That seems to cover most possible sentences and conversations. French and Spanish seem to have similar words ("alors" and "pues" respectively), heard constantly in everyday talk. These correspond to some meanings of "so", but the correspondence is only exact in its inexactitude. To a certain extent, whatever they mean, these words are just used as punctuation, to fill space as sentiments and sentences are formulated - what a relative of mine use to call "sloppy speech".

But there's something more. Life may just be, to use Arnold Toynbee's phrase, "one damn thing after another", but we crave connection, some sort of narrative thread. By scattering 'so' through our sentences, we create create connections in our conversations, and form at least the illusion of such a narrative.

Opening up

2008-03-10T18:31:00.004Z

Following Jaspergate - or Jasper-ama to adopt Andrew Gilligan's more florid moniker - you can expect to hear a lot more about openness and accountability in the mayoral election campaign.

Boris Johnson and the Lib Dems had a first stab on successive days last week, variously pledging that they would make the City Hall register of interests public, would set up a code of conduct for mayoral advisers, would require them to attend question and answer sessions with the London Assembly, and would publish details of their responsibilities and contact details on the web.

Only some of this is new: elected officials already publish their register of interests (Livingstone's is here), and all staff (including mayoral advisers) are bound by a code of conduct and required to attend London Assembly hearings if summoned. Nevertheless, these proposals could make a difference to the openness of City Hall.

If they were implemented, that is. Readers with long memories may remember Ken Livingstone's Advisory Cabinet. This big-tent public committee was one of Livingstone's election pledges in 2000, and included Labour MPs Diane Abbott, John McDonnell and Glenda Jackson (though not Frank Dobson), London Assembly members from all parties and assorted great and good from the worlds of race relations, disability and gay rights

The Advisory Cabinet met several times during Livingstone's first year in office (disconcertingly, this BBC Report of its first meeting includes a picture of an alarmingly chinless and younger me in the background). But after a while, initial enthusiasm faded, and with it the Advisory Cabinet: now a Google search brings up this ghost page.

The meetings had become, to use Bagehot's formulation, 'dignified' rather than 'efficient', with real decision-making and debate taking place behind closed doors. If Johnson or Paddick win, it will be interesting to see with how much gusto they follow through their current enthusiasm for flinging those doors open.

After the flood?

2008-03-06T13:18:00.003Z

So, how much has Ken Livingstone been damaged by the relentless revelations that culminated this week in Lee Jasper's resignation?

The last poll published, by YouGov last month, showed Boris Johnson leading Ken Livingstone, by 44 points to 39 (a reversal of their positions a month previously), though the strongest gains were made by Brian Paddick, whose share of first preference votes increased from eight to 12 per cent.

In the wacky world of the mayoral election system, however, these first preferences are only part of the story. On this basis, the second preferences of those people voting for Paddick (and minority candidates) as their first choice, would be re-distributed among the front-runners. So the critical question is whether Paddick's votes are 'anyone but Ken' or 'anyone but Boris'. That will make all the difference.

The fieldwork for the YouGov poll was conducted between 19 and 21 February, so the situation may well have worsened since then, as cringe-making personal emails became Lee Jasper's undoing. But, if the polls are only this bad, following weeks of destabilising and embarassing revelations, the Mayor might be forgiven for feeling a glimmer of optimism. Lee Jasper has resigned, the sheet has been wiped clean, a new beginning beckons...

And yet. It's always struck me as curious the fact that Andrew Gilligan's Lee-gate campaign began in December last year, fully six months before the mayoral election. Didn't such an early start run the risk that allegations would become old news in voters' minds by May? Shouldn't he have been keeping his powder dryer?

In today's Standard, in an article that gently chides Johnson for sloppy attention to detail on transport policy, Gilligan writes a sentence that might strike fear into hearts at City Hall: "Luckily for Boris, all these questions have so far been largely drowned out by the ongoing Jasperama. I can promise more such entertainments in the future."

Gilligan is an odd and obsessive character, and this may be grandstanding. But, in the week when William Hill made Boris Johnson the favourite, I wouldn't want to bet on it.

The Corrections

2008-02-02T17:48:00.000Z

The Guardian's Corrections and Clarifications column is always a good read, but it's unusual to have corrections correcting corrections. This correction, from today's paper, shows the fractures that beset the UK left:

"A clarification of an opinion piece headlined The political choice facing London could not be clearer (page 35, January 24) said that although Nick Cohen believes Ken Livingstone is unfit to be the Labour candidate for London mayor he is not a supporter of Boris Johnson, contrary to an assertion we made. In fact the piece said he had "more openly lined up behind Boris Johnson". While Nick Cohen has not endorsed Boris Johnson as a candidate he wrote in a Time Out piece in December last year, "Go Lib Dem, Green or Tory [Johnson] if you must. But don't vote for [Livingstone]" (Corrections and clarifications, page 36, January 26)."

So is that clear? Nick Cohen attacked Ken Livingstone in the Observer. Seumas Milne attacked Cohen for that attack in the Guardian, alleging that he (Cohen) was supporting Conservative candidate Boris Johnson. Cohen demanded a correction, arguing that he had never argued for Johnson, but only against Livingstone. Milne went back to his sources, and has now demanded a correction to the previous correction.

This could run and run...

Not mentioned in Dispatches

2008-01-23T19:14:00.000Z

There's nothing like the sound of the great British public in sanctimonious hue and cry. I have worked for Ken Livingstone, and I like the man, so my sympathies will be obvious. But there was a lot of dross in the Dispatches show on Monday night.

That Livingstone has spent money boosting London among our trading partners - quite right. That he likes a drink - not a great surprise (though I've seen no evidence that he habitually drinks in the morning). That he, a nostalgic socialist, has forged links with Venezuela - eccentric, but to be expected. That some of his associates come from the wacky (or even 'Stalinoid') fringes of socialism - again, unsurprising.

But there was more menace in the details. Firstly, Dispatches alleged that Livingstone's office used public money to attack Trevor Phillips in his candidacy for the chief executive of the Commission for Equality and Human Rights. Secondly, they claimed that people in Livingstone's office worked on his campaign, while being politically restricted GLA bureaucrats.

Both of these allegations are serious, but they are expressed in shades of grey. In relation to Trevor Phillips, it is easy to present the row in terms of personalities. There's been bad blood since Livingstone suggested in 2000 that Phillips might be his deputy, and Phillips replied that this was typically patronising behaviour. But there's more to it than that.

There are two distinct views of what anti-racists should seek to achieve, and how, in play here. I'm not an expert, but a simplistic view is as follows. Phillips believes in a broadly integrationist approach, which values a common 'British' identity, expresses concerns about multiculturalism and seeks to work through negotiation. Livingstone's view, or at least Lee Jasper's, is more Manichean. To create a truly multicultural society - where difference is viewed as a matter for celebration rather than a problem - the organs of the state need to be attacked until their intrinsic racism is overturned.

I don't take sides on this, or even claim that my presentation of the argument is correct, but this is about more than 'Ken hates Trevor'. In fact, you can hardly think of a more important issue for public debate. Whether the campaign was correctly pursued through attacking Phillips is another matter, but this is not about nothing.

The water is murkier still in relation to GLA officials misusing their office to pursue political ends. The staff alleged to have done so are 'politically restricted' - an injunction that applies to all senior local and central government staff. As such, of course they should be impartial.

But - and it's a huge 'but' - the staff accused of this offence were not appointed to support the Mayor as generic local government officers, but as some of his closest aides, trusted to work with a nascent bureaucracy to make sure that his policies could be implemented.

The GLA's organisational structure gave the Mayor the right to appoint 12 staff, but didn't give those staff the right to direct other offices. So Livingstone agreed with the London Assembly that they would appoint staff to help him, while he would make sure that they had the budget they needed to carry out their own role.

So, the aides' position is far more like that of special advisors than that of normal bureaucrats. For example, they all have contracts that expire at the same time as the Mayor's period in office. It may - or may not - be that some of them paid attention to the campaign to re-elect the Mayor while they were strictly speaking at work, but we appear to be talking at the margins.

Which of us can honestly say that we have not sent an email or written a letter on personal matters while in the office, whatever formal procedures may say? And would we be surprised to read that central government special advisors had an interest in the re-election of their party, as well as on the pursuance of its policy?

That said, the row exposes the persistent flaws in the GLA's constitution. With characteristic fudge, New Labour created a structure that aped the presidential model of US mayoralties - where senior officers are unambiguously appointed by the Mayor, are accountable through him and lose office when he or she does - without following through in terms of staff appointments. Politicisation is only a problem when it is surreptitious.

The new GLA Act half tackles this problem, by making staff appointments a matter for the GLA's chief executive rather than for the 'scrutinising' London Assembly. But the legislators still fail to understand the basic issue: if mayors are to rule, and to be accountable for what they do, their employees must be allowed to dance to a more political beat.

Practitionerification makes perfect

2007-11-26T19:26:00.000Z

Mocking public sector recruitment ads for meaningless managerialism and blairite gibberish is easy sport, and the pages of the Guardian a particularly fertile hunting ground. Easy sport, but to be resisted as far as possible: one doesn't want to turn into Peter Hitchens (or Christopher for that matter), and as daft as job titles might be, they are often attached to roles performing important, if Daily Mail-baiting, functions.

But...

...occasionally your eye is caught by something so toe-swivellingly inane, so mind-bendingly abstracted, so gut-wrenchingly evasive, that it needs to be picked up and shaken, like a terrier with a rat. Saturday's Guardian advertised for two roles at the National Academy for Parenting Practitioners. Even the name of the organisation (surely not NAPPIE?) gives a clue that we journeying far beyond meaning.

The first two sentences of the pre-amble will serve as a taster of the whole:

"If we want to change the world then how our children grow up is a massively important place to make a start. The role of parents is critical to that, and our changing society and its changing demands on parents removes old certainties, leaving many with a real appetite for expert support from those they trust."

Where to start? The inanity of the first sentence (sorry, Whitney)? The ocean-going banality of explaining the importance of parents to how children grow up? The evasive vagueness about "changing society and its changing demands" (we don't want to suggest any parents are inadequate, do we)? The patronising lie about the "real appetite for expert support"?

The sad thing is that, buried amidst more crap about 'parenting agendas' and 'respect action plans', NAPP's website reveals that they actually do rather sensible stuff, like training social workers who work with children - people who do one of the hardest and least appreciated jobs in the world.

It's just a shame that they, or their recruitment consultants, decided to wrap these job descriptions in such evasive, tired and sly verbiage. It makes for such an tempting target that it's hard to resist a Hitchens-esque rant, before reverting to re-assuring Toynbee-ism.

Do as I say, not as I do

2007-11-22T20:55:00.000Z

There are plenty of serious commentaries on the weird, and increasingly alarming, world of data security after the events of the past few days. This is not one of them.

BBC Political Editor Nick Robinson's excellent blog has been following the detail of the story, and provides (or at least does at the time of writing) a link to a PDF file of a sheaf of papers, including print copies of the relevant NAO-HMRC emails (with names blanked out), and an exchange of 'letters of record' between Dave Hartnett, the Acting Chairman of HMRC, and Caroline Mawhood, the Deputy Auditor General of the NAO. Mrs Mawhood's letterhead includes, for all to see, her email address, and mobile, land-line and fax numbers.

I'm no expert, but this doesn't sound like data protection 'best practice' to me. It's no excuse for the cock-up at HMRC, but it does perhaps show how easy it is to slip up when you're in a hurry.

(Not) going down the pub

2007-11-15T18:05:00.000Z

Raised on concrete stilts, the Docklands Light Railway affords a privileged view of East London to its passengers. Amidst austerely functional blocks of post-war housing, churches and pubs stand out - richly tiled and decorated relics of a Victorian past. Owned by the breweries, they (the pubs, that is) were left standing on street corners as the slums of Poplar, Shadwell and Whitechapel were demolished.

But changes in the pub trade are now conspiring with London's insanely effervescent property market to dismantle what the Luftwaffe and the planners left intact. The Evening Standard recently reported that around a quarter of pubs near the Olympic site in Bow are closing. It's unfair to blame the Olympics for this - a changing population (more muslim in East London), the smoking ban and changing attitudes to drinking all contribute - but London 2012 is accelerating the process that kills boozers.

As the market value for new-build flats goes through the roof, the new pub-owning companies - nowadays as canny as property speculators as they are at managing licensed premises - are quick to take advantage. Depending on your views, you can call this regeneration or gentrification, but the outcome is the same - a gradual retreat from the ideal of mixed-use neighbourhoods to which modern planners and developers must at least claim to aspire.

It's not just happening in East London. Urban 75 lists some of the shabbier (and I mean that as a compliment) drinking dens that have closed around Brixton in recent years, to be replaced by 'luxury apartments'. Fight backs can work: the Pineapple in Kentish Town managed to see off developers a few years ago, but it's probably easier in NW5, where stars like Rufus Sewell will rush to your aid, than in E3 or SW9.

Councils are taking notice, and several (including Tower Hamlets) have put in place policies to protect viable pubs in residential areas, but it may already be too late. The city is zoning itself, making a mockery of mixed use. As brutal 'vertical drinking' districts spread like a rash, neighbourhood pubs are in retreat, before the relentless march of housing-led 'regeneration'.

Underneath the arches

2007-11-13T11:23:00.000Z

[I wrote this article in spring and have fruitlessly pitched it at all sorts of publications since then. I think the story - one of modernist optimism and arrogance - is fascinating, but I guess that's the problem with writing things that you find interesting: will anyone else? Anyway, station architecture seems to be in vogue this week, so here's some ambivalent advocacy for one of London's least loved landmarks.]

Arriving at Euston Station during the rush hour is a curiously calming experience to anyone used to the chaos of British transport planning. As commuters stream across the concourse or gaze abjectly at the departure boards, the layout of the airy concourse is immediately comprehensible; you can see, in an instant, where everything is.

The triple-height space is bright and naturally lit, with a recessed concrete roof seeming to float above clerestory windows that let daylight flood in. The Station’s design, by British Railways architect RL Moorcroft, was deliberately minimal and monochrome: passengers and advertising hoardings would provide colour; seats were rejected as unnecessary distractions from the business of movement (and as magnets for “layabouts”). While retail kiosks now litter the concourse’s elegant green-grey marble floors, this clarity shines through the clutter.

But there is a strange absence too. The station seems almost embarrassed by grubby presence of trains themselves. Long ramps hurry you through ticket gates, to a low-ceilinged train-shed, whose industrial design and lighting, softened only by a few tentative pot plants, contrasts with the calmness of the concourse. This is not a place for the lingering goodbyes of departing lovers, or for the grimy romance of steam, but a machine for the efficient and hygienic processing of people and goods in an electric age.

This segregation of concourse from trains suggests that the model for Euston was the modernism of airport design, not anything as clunkily old-fashioned as a railway station. In the 1960s, of course, airports were still glamorous places, holding out promises of the exotic, rather than airless boxes stuffed with opportunities for queuing, and humiliation in the name of security. When the station was completed in 1968, Architects Journal made this comparison explicit, criticising the paucity of catering outlets at Euston compared to West London (now Heathrow) Airport, and – more outlandishly – asking why the station still relied on porters, rather than using conveyor belt technology to transfer luggage.

The Station was also criticised for its external spaces, and age has not improved these. There is no sign of thinking outside this glass and steel box, and any fleeting flavour of sixties glamour quickly evaporates. In front of the station, a statue of George Stephenson watches over one of London’s most desolate public spaces. Even on the calmest of days, smokers, street drinkers and commuters are buffeted by gusting winds and mini-cyclones of debris. The black glass and marble office buildings and gallery that create this foul microclimate also contrive, together with desolate planters and kiosks, to hide the station’s façade from the bus station and Euston Road. There may not be many fans of the Euston’s architecture, but making stations invisible does not improve their accessibility to the travelling public.

Things were very different 100 years ago. Euston’s Doric Arch (or propylaeum to be thoroughly correct) stood at the gateway to the Victorian station. It was designed, together with the original buildings, by Philip Hardwick for the London and Birmingham Railway Company and completed in 1838. The station buildings, and in particular the Great Hall designed by Hardwick’s son and completed in 1849, were themselves fine pieces of classical architecture: the current concourse pays sly tribute to the Great Hall’s recessed ceilings and clerestory windows. But it was the 22-metre high Arch that became iconic. It was described by JM Richards, editor of the Architectural Review, as “one of the outstanding architectural creations of the early 19th Century, and the most important – and visually most satisfying – monument to the railway age which Britain pioneered”.

The Victorian station was set further back from Euston Road than its sixties replacement. Bringing the station south, to make room for longer platforms and larger trains, was a crucial element of the re-development plans. Today, architects might have been asked to work round the Arch, to treat it as a non-negotiable ‘given’ in their designs. British Rail does not appear to have given much consideration to this possibility: the Arch would have to go. First of all, it was to be re-located intact, then demolished and rebuilt, and then simply demolished, unless someone could come up with £190,000 (nearly £3 million today) to enable its relocation and reconstruction.

Between 1959 and 1961, appeals from a growing and sometimes improbable coalition – including the Royal Fine Arts Commission, the Victorian and Georgian Societies, Nikolaus Pevsner, Woodrow Wyatt, Tom Driberg, Sir John Betjeman, and Alison and Peter Smithson – fell on deaf ears, as the buck passed from the British Transport Commission (British Rail’s ‘parent company’) to London County Council, and back again. Eventually, in November 1961, Harold Macmillan, then prime minister, received a deputation of protest, but loftily dismissed their arguments. “Concern for such relics,” he said, “will sap national vitality.” Nothing could be done, nothing was, and the Arch was demolished in 1962.

All that remains of the 19th Century Euston today is a pair of gatehouses, inconspicuous alongside the thundering traffic of Euston Road, the destinations engraved on their stone a mute memorial to the height of the steam age. The Doric Arch itself is cheekily commemorated on decorative tiling in Euston Underground Station, and in local street and pub names. In a curious footnote, fragments were found in an East London river in the mid-1990s, and a campaign to rebuild it was launched. But it is hard to see the sense in its resurrection, divorced of context, after a 45-year absence.

But, in some ways, Euston Arch’s destruction has had a more powerful legacy than its retention could ever have achieved. It galvanised and united the heritage movement, drawing it away from the perceived elitism of preserving set-piece churches and palaces, to a more democratic concern with the places – stations, factories and shops – that were part of modern every day life. The apathy, arrogance and evasiveness of the state also prompted new legislation: the 1967 Civic Amenities Act established conservation areas as a more subtle tool than the listing of individual buildings, and the 1968 Town and Country Planning Act made the demolition of listed buildings illegal.

Nobody shed a tear just before Easter, when Network Rail announced the return of the bulldozers to Euston. Nobody is going to start a campaign to preserve the Station as a treasure for the nation. Its charms are too elusive, and its faults too obvious. Aside from which, the strength of London’s commercial property market and the potential of the empty space above the station makes a compelling case for redevelopment. But, long after British Land’s promised “major mixed use development” has been completed, Euston may still be remembered for what it once represented – the dawn of a new electric age of convenience and efficiency – as well as for the cavalier disdain for the past that accompanied that dawn. This was the future once, and this was where that future stopped.

The world turned upside down

2007-11-02T11:45:00.000Z

[Now also on Comment is Free]

Ken Livingstone was on virtuoso form on Today this morning, defending Met Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair as robustly as he could (and that’s pretty robustly), and freestyling over a range of topics – from the iniquities of Health and Safety culture, to the superiority of continental inquisitorial courts to our adversarial model - like a saner version of Heather Mills.

Even more dazzling than the Mayor’s gladiatorial skill is the curious sense that we have passed through the looking glass. A Labour Mayor, elected from the left of the party, stands behind a police chief whose officers shot dead an innocent immigrant worker, and whose force has been found guilty of ‘catastrophic’ failings as a result. On the other side are ranged Conservative Party figures, from the curiously Edwardian figure of Dominic Grieve to the just plain curious mayoral candidate Boris Johnson, calling for resignations and considerations of positions. It will make for an interesting mayoral election next year.

But underneath all this opportunism and inversion of political normality some longer games are being played out. Compared to his predecessor, ‘copper’s copper’ Sir John Stevens, Sir Ian Blair has been a force for reform within the Met, pushing managerialist battles against waste, as well as ideological warfare on the ‘institutional racism’ that was diagnosed by the Stephen Lawrence Enquiry.

As such, Sir Ian is an important ally for Ken Livingstone, whose anti-racism is only matched by his strong (and sometimes 1950s-nostalgic) law-and-order focus. But there is something deeper too. When Ken Livingstone was elected in 2000, the Mayor’s powers over the Met Police were pretty limited: he could appoint 12 of the 23 members of the Metropolitan Police Authority, which oversees the Met Police, and even these were essentially nominated by the party groups on the London Assembly. He could also agree the Met’s annual budget (subject to the ability of the Government to stipulate a minimum).

This was not the relationship between a US City Mayor and Police Commissioner, but something far weaker, stymied by Government’s traditional reluctance to cede power over policing in the capital to any form of local government. Ken Livingstone set about changing this confused structure of accountability by ignoring it. He proclaimed himself an ally of first Stevens then Blair, boosting their budgets in exchange for promises of specific action on crime, on waste, on racism, beating up the hapless London Assembly when they sought to challenge these hikes in Council Tax, and presenting to the world an image of the Mayor as the man in charge.

This tactic has worked: from next year the Mayor will be able to appoint the Chair of the MPA, or even to take the role himself, as well as taking power over many other policy areas where he has staked his claim. By seeming, or even pretending, to be in charge, Ken Livingstone has clawed power from a possessive and nervous state. That’s why the man who has no right to hire or fire the Met Police Commissioner was defending him on the radio this morning.

Big bad cities

2007-10-23T18:05:00.000+01:00

The pun may have been weak, but the message behind WWF's headline ("Cities need to green up their act") seemed pretty clear: cities are the problem.

WWF (formerly, and perhaps formally, known as The World Wildlife Fund) has come up with a catchy and polemically useful way of describing our ecological footprint - the amount of the earth's natural resources needed to sustain our current lifestyles and consumption patterns. We - in the UK - are living a 'three-planet lifestyle'. That is, if the whole world were to live as we do, we would need three (or 3.1, to be precise) worlds to support us. That we are still alive is only thanks to people like the Indians, who make up for our profligacy by living a '0.4-planet lifestyle'.

The WWF report compares the performance of 60 British cities, and creates a ranking. Newport and Plymouth perform best, and Winchester comes off worst. So, these urban dens of eco-iniquity are dragging the rest of us down. Or are they? When you look at the figures again, it looks as if British cities are actually doing rather well: more than two thirds of them are performing better than the UK average. The press release seems to have forgotten to mention this.

This does not, of course, contradict WWF's main message, that we ought to consume and live more frugally and responsibly. Sure. But why are cities always the villains in this piece? In some ways (for example, sourcing food locally) it may be harder to live a one-planet lifestyle in a city. But Tesco's pandemic spread across the UK suggests that not everybody in rural areas shops locally, and in other arenas (public transport and higher density living) cities should have a natural advantage.

Asking how the green potential of cities could be better unlocked would be a constructive approach to this debate. But the green movement seems unable to move on from its utopian, pastoralist roots, regarding everything since the invention of the spinning jenny with deep suspicion. Green and pleasant land good; dark satanic mills bad.

Our cities may be part of the problem. But with a growing population, they will have to be the core of any solution.

Magic and loss

2007-10-19T09:32:00.000+01:00

Tread softly when you tread on a childhood.

I surprised myself, when I read reviews of The Seeker: The Dark is Rising, and when I saw the trailer. I felt angry, let down, even personally affronted.

One has to put away childish things, but Susan Cooper's sequence of novels were probably the most important books I read as a child. Dad read me The Lord of the Rings (del capo, one hell of a job), and Narnia always looked a bit naff. But The Dark is Rising was perfect. It was about a child growing up near the Chilterns, where I grew up, and the books were rich, humourless and terrifying in a way that only a kid can appreciate.

The supernatural elements were prehistoric and portentous: mutilated sheep, horses' skulls and sad sea hags, not muggles, recidivist billy-bunterism and magic spells. They alarmed, but also inculcated a curious supernatural patriotism, educating the 1970s child about British folklore, and its casual and persistent horror, like a cross between The Wicker Man and the didactic monotone of Willard Price's novels.

Susan Cooper has been chillingly polite about the film, acknowledging the need for novels to change, but also questioning why an 11-year old English child had to be changed to a 13-year old American child in England. Others have also noted that an evangelical Christian director has reduced an essentially pagan world view to one that is reassuringly Manichean (anticipating the row to come over the films of Philip Pullman's novels).

Interestingly, she also reveals that she wrote the books as an exile in the USA, conjuring a vivid image of a distant Britain that is even more lost today than it probably was even then. I probably won't watch the film. But the books still grip me, and haunt me when I walk, and when I imagine I walk, in the old hills of England and Wales.

Fairways...and foul

2007-10-11T11:10:00.000+01:00

Aside from looking as if a sporran, or some other Highlands rodent, has taken up residence on his head, there was never much to tie Donald Trump to Scotland, before his battle, reported in yesterday’s Guardian, to take over Michael Forbes’ coastal landholding 13 miles north of Aberdeen.

Mr Trump wants to build 1,000 homes, a 45-room hotel and a golf course on the site. The houses are regrettably necessary as a cross-subsidy for the nine-hole golf course, which is presented as a good thing in itself (and a saviour of the dunes, rather than, as Scottish Natural Heritage see it, a destruction of important natural heritage). Mr Trump’s sensibilities are particularly offended by the state of Michael Forbes’ property: “... the area is in total disrepair. Take a look at how badly maintained the piece of property is: it's disgusting. Rusty tractors, rusty oil cans.”

It sounds a mess, but the countryside isn’t neat. The countryside can be beautiful, alarming, calming and depressing. It can smell beautiful or rank, and can be muddy, sandy or soft. But it is rarely neat. Modern farmyards are some of its least appealing features: lean-to sheds, decaying farm machinery, scraps of blue plastic sacking and strange rivulets of chemicals vie to disabuse us of any pastoral fantasies. This, the shambolic yards seem to say, is a productive place, not a pretty place.

Golf courses, on the other hand, are neatness incarnate. Flying into Heathrow or Gatwick, you get a privileged, if not particularly sustainable, view of these made-up meadowlands, which pepper south-eastern England with their curiously pock-marked landscapes. Golf courses may be neat, but they are a whole barrel of ugly too: privatised green spaces, permitted within the green belt on the basis of being a 'leisure' use, but bearing as much relationship to the countryside as Mickey Mouse does to the rodents under my floorboards.

With the rising demand for land for housing, and insistent questioning of the sustainability of green belt policies, we might be tempted to follow the example of the Mayor of Caracas, who suggested seizing golf courses to house the city’s poor. Even at a fifth of his proposed density (5,000 people per course), we could use England’s 1,800 golf courses to house nearly two million people, which must go some way meeting the Government’s annual target of 200,000 new homes.

If that turns out to be a touch controversial – as it may – here is another modest proposal. We could simply reclassify golf-courses as previously developed ‘brown field’ land (which they surely are, given the earth moving and ersatz planting that goes into their creation), and let the housing market do the rest as land values rose.

It's been a long time

2007-10-03T16:30:00.000+01:00

I've been distracted, having holidays, not smoking, all sorts. I've also been reading Robert Caro's biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker.

The book is a monster of nearly 1,200 pages, and its subject comes over as pretty monstrous too. From the mid 1920s to the 1960s, Robert Moses dominated public projects in New York, covering the five boroughs and Long Island with new toll roads, beaches, parks and bridges, creating the type of alienating, car-dominated urban landscape that Jane Jacobs has taught all good urbanists to despise. He achieved these feats through a combination of thuggish arrogance and low cunning, with unattractive top-notes of racism and class prejudice.

And yet, governor after governor, and mayor after mayor, found him indispensable, unsackable. Whatever his methods, Moses got things done, and he got them done within electoral timescales. When he was building his first parks on Long Island in the mid-1920s, he had $1 million out of a total of $15 million. Instead of completing a few projects within budget, he assembled land for a much larger number, thereby forcing NY State Congress to vote him the remainder. Caro reports him as saying: "once you sink that first stake, they'll never make you pull it up."

What would Moses have made of Crossrail's latest faltering step forwards? When I worked on the Jubilee Line extension project in the mid 1990s, Crossrail was the next big project. Offices were being set up, and engineers recruited. And then, nothing. And now, maybe something? But breakthroughs are reported so frequently, and to so little effect, that it's hard to feel too excited by the news.

We seem to be very good at stopping big projects happening in the UK. The Treasury feels that it has been burned by so many wannabe-Moses characters, that it publishes volume upon volume of guidance on stopping big projects. The safest answer is always 'no'. Soon after London won the 2012 Games, I had a meeting with a senior civil servant. "You've got the Treasury in an awful spin," he said. "You've robbed them of their three standard strategies: delay, descope and say 'no'." At the IOC meeting in July 2005, London (Jowell, Livingstone, Coe) put some stakes in the ground. They won't be quickly forgiven.

No time for heroes

2007-08-28T12:43:00.000+01:00

Think tank ippr are arguing for a new national bank holiday for Britain, 'which would act as a national ‘thank you’ for community heroes and as a national ‘ask’ for people to give back to their communities'.

I have nothing against another day off work, but this endless flailing around after a post-nationalist national day for Britain seems doomed to fail (I'll leave Northern Ireland out of this for the moment).

We are not like other countries: for nearly 1,000 years, we have consistently failed to be invaded (hence giving us the opportunity to liberate ourselves), to stage any proper revolutions or to execute our aristocracy. Other countries can celebrate these bloody triumphs, or equally arcane religious festivals, saved from guilt by the power of tradition.

Instituting a new festival is a lot more complicated: it's not easy to find an uncontroversial historical event that fits the bill since 1066 (and it's not clear whether 'we' won or lost then, or even who 'we' were). Waterloo? Trafalgar? Too bellicose. Patron saints? We have three of them, and there are other religions (and Richard Dawkins), you know. Welfare State Day? Too lefty. Diana Day? God help us.

So, we are left with the lowest common denominator, a fuzzily inclusive 'community day'. Do you live in a community? The word is weasel-y, often used as a euphemism for 'poor people', as a hollow claim of legitimacy or as a vacuous affirmation - an attempt to create unity through its application to a disparate group of people. It is hard to imagine what depths of telethon schmaltz such a celebration would sink to.

The interesting thing about ippr's proposal is their choice of date: the Monday after Remembrance Sunday. Remembrance Sunday already serves as a curiously sombre national day, lent diversity by the contribution of the Commonwealth to the wars of the last century. It's a poignant, autumnal event, a mournful memory of individual and national loss. Rather British, when you come to think about it...

Siren songs

2007-08-06T17:49:00.000+01:00

I live on a busy road near Brixton Police Station, so I get to see – and hear – plenty of policing in action. From morning to night, police cars and vans rush past in a blur of sirens and blue lights, sometimes zipping past each other in opposite directions.

But you rarely see police officers out of their vehicles. Friday night was an exception. Emerging from Stockwell tube station, I was confronted by ten or so police officers in the ticket hall, with dogs nosing at passengers’ briefcases and shopping bags. What was this all about, I asked? ‘Public reassurance’, I was told, then (when I insisted that I was not feeling re-assured), ‘drugs’.

It made me think of another incident a few weeks earlier. A crowd of school kids had gathered opposite my flat at about 4pm, and were argy-bargying about. The man from Brixton Cycles, who keeps a close eye on the street, came out and told them to calm down, which they did.

A few moments later, a police car screeched to a halt, and two officers leapt out. As the crowd began to scatter and slink away, two more vehicles appeared: an unmarked car with two plain-clothes officers, and a minibus with several more. It’s worth noting in passing that all the kids were black, and all the officers white.

Meanwhile, within the past ten days, two black teenagers have been shot dead within half a mile of my flat: Nathan Foster near Brixton tube on Friday night, and Abukar Mahamud a week earlier in Stockwell. The lack of volume control shown by the police – their inability to deploy anything less than full force – is thrown into sharp relief by this horrific backdrop.

The police can’t be everywhere, of course, and cannot be expected to anticipate where crimes may take place, but this style of policing seems to have no sense of proportion, to allow for no half-measures. Police charge around in their vehicles, either chasing after crimes that have already taken place, or swarming over every infraction, however minor, as if facing the combined force of Osama Bin Laden and the Kray Twins

I know that many police officers deem the ‘bobby on the beat’ to be a public relations strategy that does nothing to prevent crime or catch criminals, but this approach - it would be tempting to call it the 'Hot Fuzz School of Community Policing' if it wasn't so serious - does not look efficient or effective. A few policemen and women patrolling on foot, particularly at night, might even deter the impression that our streets are war zones requiring personal protection, sirens and high speed driving skills to stay alive.

It’s hard to say whether a more visible presence on the streets might have saved two young lives, but we need to try something different. Whatever is happening now – however much it is presented as ‘scientific’ or ‘evidence-based’ – is clearly not working.

Paddling while England sinks

2007-07-24T13:41:00.000+01:00

The Government’s consultation on boosting housing supply could hardly have started at a worse time. With residents of west country towns looking down at filthy waters from their first floor windows, this was not the best moment to publish policy documents that emphasise the need to create more homes, even if these are to be on flood plains.

To be fair, the Green Paper on housing does acknowledge the likelihood of increased flooding in the future, and the need to ensure adequate flood defences and to avoid “inappropriate development in areas at risk of flooding”. But these cautious statements sit uneasily with the desperate need for new housing reflected in the document. Can we have it both ways, or are we paddling while England sinks?

Seeing your home flood must be vile for the victims. Viler still must be the knowledge that, as the brown water inexorably rises, your next months will be spent squabbling with insurers, throwing out ruined carpets and furniture, chipping off sodden and contaminated plaster, just to make your home habitable again. Maybe the Environment Agency can be blamed for delayed warnings and late arrival of flood defence barriers, but these would only have bought time as rivers swelled to 36 feet above their normal level.

What is to be done? We could continue to build flood defences higher and higher, until the rivers that give many of our towns and cities their beauty are hidden from view by huge levees. Or we could turn the problem around, creating open space that can act as flood storage, and building homes that can quickly recover from flooding. The Dutch, whose country is one big flood plain, have already started to build amphibious houses on hollow concrete bases, which can rise four metres when rivers flood.

But we don’t need to go that far. Government and the Association of British Insurers (ABI) have both published guidance on flood resilience, for new build and existing houses respectively. Gypsum-based plaster can be replaced with more water-resistant materials, ground floor rooms can be used as service space, electrical sockets can be put halfway up walls and non-return valves can be fitted to drains.

Flood resilience measures might not be pretty – plastic kitchen units and concrete floors, anyone? – and leaving the ground floor to services and car parking conflicts with everything that urban designers learn about ‘animated street fronts’. But the ABI calculates that spending an extra £34,000 on making repairs to a three-bedroom house more resilient could save £37,000 on repair costs next time that the waters rise (let alone several times that in anguish).

One in ten UK homes is already at risk from flooding, and we can only expect that proportion – and the frequency and severity of floods – to increase. Instead of demanding ever higher, more intrusive and more expensive defences, like some latter-day Cnuts, we could accept flooding as a fact of life, which careful planning and design can turn from a cataclysm to an inconvenience.

Paper tigers

2007-07-17T19:14:00.000+01:00

It must be depressing being Victoria Borwick, Warwick Lightfoot, Andrew Boff or Lurline Champagne. Magnificent names aside, these putative Conservative candidates for the London mayoral election in 2008 are already eclipsed by Planet Boris. Former DJ Mike Read has thrown his questionable weight behind the bumptious blonde on the Guardian's Comment is Free website, prompting ribald comment and cruel queries about when fellow DJ Nicey will make his intentions clear.

What promises to be a lively contest will be made livelier still by the fact that London now has two evening papers, which are already making their picks.

The current Mayor's loathing for the Evening Standard (and London Lite, its free sister paper), published by Associated Newspapers, is fully reciprocated, so it was no surprise that the paper gave Boris Johnson the platform to launch his candidacy yesterday, and followed it up today with tenuous tales of a 'Boris bounce', based on Facebook entries and a pretty ambiguous poll.

The London Paper, the freebie anti-Standard spoiler launched by News International last year, has been less explicit about its preferences (and lacks the formal editorial column to make these clear). But today it gave Ken Livingstone a column to attack his opponent, and further space to a less than glowing portrait by Johnson's biographer, Andrew Gimson.

The brutal war being waged between Associated Newspapers and News International (and their proxies in London politics) has opened up a new front. This is about more than politics; this is about circulation.

Undignified, yes, but efficient?

2007-07-16T16:32:00.000+01:00

Walter Bagehot’s masterwork, The English Constitution, famously distinguished the ‘dignified’ from the ‘efficient’ parts of government. The monarchy was part of the former, parliamentary democracy (still in robust health in the 1860s) was the latter.

The office of Mayor of London can be viewed in a similar way. The Mayor is the elected representative of the metropolis, with one of the largest personal mandates in Europe. Nationally, and internationally, he is seen as the capital’s voice, whether talking about his statutory responsibilities or offering views on world affairs.

But the Mayor also has specific duties, powers and functions. He is responsible for developing a curious ragbag of strategies, for allocating budgets, for overseeing the London’s transport, economic development, police and fire services, and for certain key planning decisions. The ‘dignified’ Mayor deals publicly in visions for London. The ‘efficient’ Mayor functions invisibly, working his limited powers and resources to deliver this vision, forever locked in titanic struggles with the apparatus of the state.

Which brings us to Boris Johnson. There is little doubt that he would be able to dominate the headlines like Ken Livingstone, and perhaps to cause offence to as many people. So that’s the ‘dignified’ (or perhaps ‘undignified’) role in the bag. But does he have the stomach for the detail, the serpentine cunning and tactical skill to wring money and powers from the state (the second most centralised after North Korea’s, according to current Mayor)?

Recent US history shows us that there is no barrier to buffoons forming governments, if they have the shadowy figures around them to undertake the nitty gritty of administration. And Boris Johnson is, of course, far less of a buffoon than he likes to appear.

Interestingly, he has also, in launching his campaign, gone straight for the policy jugular. A bit of robust abuse (“King Newt”), which will no doubt be repaid in kind, is combined with an attack on those fronts where Ken Livingstone is weakest: muggings, buses and the Underground. These may not be things that any Mayor can easily solve, but they are the irritants that scratch away at London’s world-beating veneer and at the daily lives of its citizens. Johnson has even managed to draw out the contrast between himself – the Old Etonian everyman on his bike – and Livingstone, who is as reluctant to ride a bicycle himself as he is keen to promote their use by others.

This promises to be a bloody, and entertaining, fight. Boris Johnson is right to describe the incumbent as "'one of the wiliest and most enduring politicians of the modern age." But If he can match his celebrity status with convincing Londoners that he means business, he could go the distance with the man who has come to personify London for the past seven years. London’s irreverent electoral mob might just swap one renegade for another.

High stakes

2007-07-16T16:01:00.000+01:00

Today's news that Metronet, the consortium contracted to maintain and operate the London Underground's Bakerloo, Central and Victoria lines, is likely to enter administration can actually be seen as a curious type of success for the PPP. These contracts are not a one-way bet.

Public private partnerships for major public infrastructure projects have tended to look like one-way bets for the private sector. They charge the public sector for taking on 'risk', but everybody knows that the state will have to step in if problems threaten to destroy public goods: hospitals, schools, railway and road networks cannot be allowed to go to the wall as private businesses would if they became insolvent.

The fact that the PPP arbitrator has called their bluff, and refused to grant Metronet the mind-boggling £551 million that they were seeking to cover their overspend, shows that this bet is not the sure thing it must have once looked like. But whatever the short-term pain to Metronet's shareholders, it will ultimately be taxpayers who meet the cost of keeping these Underground lines afloat, and of the bizarrely money-gobbling, lawyer-ridden farce that the PPP has turned out to be.

Green grow the balance sheets oh!

2007-07-08T09:52:00.000+01:00

The morning after the world of pop and rock jetted to Wembley to tell us about climate change, a browse through the Sunday paper...

Nearly 12 pages of the 40-page main section of The Observer are given over to advertising. Top categories are:

electricity, IT services and electrical goods (30 per cent of the advertising space)
cars (25 per cent)
financial services (14 per cent)
holidays and flights (8 per cent)

Perhaps more revealing than these figures is the fact that 40 per cent of space is given over to advertisements that make environmental claims. A few are summarised below, without any lawyer-baiting discussion about the claims made:

A satellite TV system switches itself off at night, transforming its dozing customers into 'eco-warriors';
A credit card gives 50 per cent of its profits to climate change projects (thereby helping a cute wide-eyed baby);
A bank is carbon-neutral, as illustrated by equally cute polar bears;
A small car-manufacturer questions 'why spend 2 litres of petrol to get one litre of milk?';
An IT firm points out that its inkjet cartridges are recycled through their 'Planet Partners' programme.

Keep shopping. Save the world.

Life after Livingstone?

2007-07-05T10:42:00.000+01:00

Boris Johnson? Greg Dyke? John Major? With less than a year to go till the next London mayoral election, a growing sense of desperation is settling over opposition parties. Is there anyone out there who the Conservatives haven't approached? Anyone who has a chance of beating Ken Livingstone?

Standing against the Mayor, who has twice seen off all comers (including his own party in 2000), must be one of the least enviable jobs in politics. Steven Norris has twice proved an effective and jocular opponent, largely through distancing himself as far from Conservative Party policy as Livingstone has from Labour Party policy, but will surely not have the appetite to be ‘three times a loser’.

The Conservatives’ much-trumpeted plans for a talent-show approach have gone rather quiet, though several candidates – primarily from local government backgrounds – have expressed interest, and a London-wide primary will take place in September. But rumours of bids from heavy-hitters like John Major, Olympic chief Sebastian Coe and former Met Police commissioner John Stevens seem to have evaporated.

The Liberal Democrats have mounted serious candidates – Susan Kramer (now MP for Richmond Park) in 2000, and Bermondsey MP Simon Hughes in 2004 – but the prospect of their party holding the balance of power at Westminster after the next general election must look more attractive in career development terms than another round in the ring with the former member for Brent East.

In 2000, it was said that Tony Blair hoped that an independent businessperson rather than a professional politician would win the mayoralty. This time around, plenty of colourful characters are emerging: DJs Mike Read and James Whale, Big Issue founder John Bird, actor Tom Conti and Right Said Fred singer Richard Fairbrass. Leaving aside the fact that many of these candidates seem propelled primarily by their resentment of London’s congestion charge, they are not quite of Michael Bloomberg’s – or even Richard Branson’s – calibre.

The irony is that, in setting up a system to attract political outsiders, New Labour created a job that was tailor-made for one of their own renegades. In seven years, Ken Livingstone has entrenched himself, re-engineering the City Hall machine to operate as he wants it to; he has become part of its wiring.

Like him or loathe him (and there are plenty in both camps), Ken Livingstone is a consummate politician, on top of his brief, sharp and able to speak off-the-cuff (and sometimes off-the-wall) on pretty well any subject. As a former GLA employee, I can testify to the frustration of listening to a pitch-perfect mayoral performance, with the only duff notes being those taken from his carefully-crafted official briefing.

Though the media relish the intemperate outbursts – against Evening Standard journalists, against the Saudi royal family, against George Bush – Ken Livingstone is now more likely to be heard extolling his carefully nuanced vision for London: the city succeeds because ‘The City’ succeeds, supported by London’s diversity and openness (in contrast to New York, marooned in Fortress America). London’s turbo-capitalist growth and growing diversity are to be embraced and celebrated, but also to be used as an engine for greater social justice and for tackling climate change.

Over seven years, almost unnoticed, he has transformed himself from the khaki-clad newt-fancier of yore, into the very model of a modern city boss, known across the world, and clad in imperial purple (or at least the odd Ozwald Boateng bespoke suit). La cité, c’est lui.

There are two sides to Ken Livingstone. One is the glamourpuss, clearly relishing the limelight and the occasional slanging match. The other is the slightly nerdy technocrat, who enjoys the day-to-day business of running London. He has stretched the Greater London Authority’s curious rag-bag of powers taut in trying to create change in a chaotic city. The Mayor enjoys getting stuck in: from negotiating with developers, to introducing and extending a congestion charge, to battling with local boroughs, pigeons and PPP consortiums, to bringing more buses onto the street, to making deals for cheap oil with Hugo Chavez, to attracting the 2012 Olympics (and billions of pounds of public money) to East London.

Ken Livingstone has said that a good candidate could easily unseat him next year, but this sounds more like a playground taunt – ‘come and have a go, if you think you’re hard enough' – than a sincere sentiment. He would like to stay in post till 2016. Running London is not a springboard for him, but the only job that he seems to want. GLA polls show a gentle decline in his personal approval ratings, but the field of opponents does not give confidence that he will be easily toppled.

From Canary Wharf to Canvey Island

2007-06-24T09:33:00.000+01:00

Thames Gateway: environmental disaster in the making, bleak repository for the worst of ticky-tacky volume housebuilding, or an unrivalled offer of increased prosperity, enhanced environment and vibrant quality of life? Only one of these asssessments is drawn from a Government website. You can probably guess which.

In the wake of a recent National Audit Office (NAO) report, commentators have been lining up to give ‘the Thames Gateway project’ a comprehensive monstering. The NAO criticised the project for having too many organisations involved, and for lacking clear leadership, a costed delivery plan and performance indicators.

This is all fine as far as it goes (though as an ex-researcher for the Audit Commission, the NAO’s local government equivalent, I know that these criticisms are audit boilerplate, applicable to almost any area of public life), but it’s worth keeping a sense of scale.

The Thames Gateway is vast: more than 700 square miles of land, stretching from London’s East End to the Isle of Sheppey (as far as the distance from Marble Arch to Oxford). It contains multitudes: marshland and power stations, wharfs and wild horses, factories and new towns, Canary Wharf and Canvey Island. Should there be – could there be – a single vision or plan for such a place?

Architect Sir Terry Farrell thinks there should. He has been decrying the Government’s failure to adopt his ‘vision’ in the media. He thinks we could accommodate not hundreds of thousands, but millions of home in London’s built up areas, leaving the rest of the Gateway as a national park and creating new islands at the mouth of the Thames. But these proposals are more a welcome provocation than the sort of plan the NAO are seeking.

I should declare an interest. In a previous life, I helped develop plans for London’s slice of Thames Gateway. These were profoundly modest in their scope, and even then took more than a year of debate between multiple agencies and layers of government. It’s hard to see what the alternative is, in a pluralistic and complex society. Which organisations should be knocked out of the way: county councils, the Mayor of London, regional development agencies?

To an extent, the Government is a victim of its own hype, or even of hubris. They trumpeted Thames Gateway as the biggest regeneration project in the world and said that they were in charge. Their bluff is now being called. They have a small team in Whitehall, some new urban regeneration bodies, and a budget of £700 million over three years. This is a lot of money, but looks smaller spread across 700 miles; it’s probably only about twice the build costs of London’s Olympic stadium. To be honest, government can only tinker at the edges, while Barratt, Persimmon and Bellway Homes get on with business as usual.

There is a growing debate about whether the state should become more interventionist, and should start to manage house building and urban regeneration more directly, rather than seeking to regulate and plan a market over which they have little real control. This is a subject for another day, but in the meantime we might ask: is the problem that Thames Gateway is too big, or that government is too small?

An archaeology of advertising

2007-06-23T16:36:00.000+01:00

Metronet, the PPP consortium struggling to stay solvent while it operates and upgrades London Underground's Bakerloo, Central and Victoria lines, doesn't have many fans.

But either Metronet, or one of their sub-contractors, seems to be running a rolling exhibition of antique advertising, which has been carefully left in place as posters are stripped back in the public spaces of Victoria Line stations. Towards the end of 2006, this exhibition hovered at Oxford Circus. Now - for a limited time only - it is at Warren Street.

The posters at Warren Street seem to date from around 1989 (on the basis of the release dates of Wilt and Ghostbusters 2), though one for Whitley's Shopping Centre could have been dated from the 1930s. They look incredibly antique: bright blocky colours, wordy captions, and none of the sly irony that we have come to expect over the past 20 years. The overall effect is as alien as the garish supplements about investment opportunities in former soviet republics that sometimes fall from the Sunday papers.

Normally, advertising on the underground is just unwelcome visual noise (now even clumsily imposed on the minimalist Jubilee Line extension escalators), but these posters are worth a view. So, hurry, hurry, the opportunity to enjoy these blasts from the past is strictly time-limited.

Within weeks, the posters will be gone, and Metronet will have begun to 'improve' Warren Street Tube, with its usual glaring striplights, bargain-basement tiles and tacky wipe-clean wall panels.

Larks' Tongues

2007-06-17T11:40:00.000+01:00

BBC2's Rome was back on the television last night, revelling with gory glee in the plottings and the stabbing. The orgies, the feasts of larks' tongues and the pearls dissolved in vinegar are just around the corner.

This is history in hindsight: we see the seeds of the Roman Empire's collapse being sown in the retreat from the austere and stoic values of the Republic. We can thank historians like Suetonius for this lurid and prurient tale of geopolitical decline following close on the heels of moral decadence. It has proved a compelling narrative for future generations too, from Shakespeare to Gibbon.

Is it a narrative for today? While problems press on us from all sides - environmental collapse, intractable wars, political and social alienation - many of us have never had it so good. We live lives of comfort and plenty, lives that are enriched by foreign travel, new foods, new media.

Is this dissonance a new normality or is our persistent celebration of consumption a sign of our decadence? Are we eating larks' tongues? Two things I noticed recently:

The ipod is a totemic piece of technology for our time, offering unparalleled ease of use coupled with elegance of design. I recently picked up a flyer, asking 'Is your ipod still sitting in its box?', and offering to fill ipods with music for their owners, to give training sessions, to personalise ipod mixes to make their owners look sophisticated.

At the Young Vic Theatre, performances of 'Vernon God Little', a satirical tale of the white working class in the southern USA can be preceded by a special menu in the venue's restaurant, where middle-class theatre-goers can eat ironic (but locally sourced and organic) variants on southern white trash food.

I'm not trying to criticise these quirks of our culture (on the contrary, I can vouch for the Vernon God Little burger as juicy and well-cooked), but I sometimes wonder how our lives would look to a visitor from another planet, or even to a future historian sniffing out the decadent portents of decline.

Any more larks' tongues out there?

What's in a name?

2007-06-16T11:17:00.000+01:00

It's very rare these days for a story to appear and disappear, without leaving a digital trail somewhere on the internet.

Last Thursday (14 June 2007), London's three evening papers picked up the same story: that the International Olympic Committee Co-ordination Commission (the group of IOC members sent over to check on London's progress in preparing for the 2012 Games) had said that they were uncomfortable with the Olympic Delivery Authority's name.

Why? Because the bulk of the ODA's £9bn budget is now to be spent on cleaning up land and putting infrastructure into East London's Lea Valley, rather than on erecting Olympic venues. The panjandrums of the IOC are nothing of not assiduous in defending the value of their brand, and they were reported to be unhappy with the association of the 'O-word' with such extensive public spending (and some of the unavoidable but unpleasant side-effects of development, like displacement of businesses and residents).

The story had a ring of truth, however odd it might seem at first glance. The IOC is very keen to emphasise that the Olympic Games are self-funding (from ticketing, sponsorship and merchandising revenues). Their view is that, if a city has to build new facilities to accommodate the Games, then that is their business, and a demonstration of the catalytic effect that the whole circus can have on nations that host it.

But you can't have it both ways. It is a truth insufficiently acknowledged that 'regeneration' is not the one way street that its shiny name implies. Regeneration displaces, and regeneration costs. The Olympics have made the Government do what they would never have done otherwise: make the heavy investment needed to turn round one of the poorest areas in the UK. The IOC should be proud to be associated with this investment, and should take its share of the knocks too.

The story had vanished by Thursday night. Perhaps it was untrue. Or perhaps it was seen as too damaging to the brand...

S-H-O-P-P-I-N-G

2007-06-14T09:55:00.000+01:00

The capital city of the nation of shopkeepers is getting worried. Is London beginning to face the same pressures that have stripped many other town and city centres of their life?

Over the next few years, central London's shops will face a bit of a rocky road, with growing competition from what might be called 'out-of-town-in-town' retail malls: at White City to the west, at Stratford to the East and at the expanded Brent Cross/Cricklewood scheme to the north. Combined with congestion charging, and the homogenisation of retail through 'clone town' encroachment by large chains, the threat is particularly acute for smaller and independent shops.

Kensington and Chelsea recently established an independent commission to look at the future of retail within the borough and their report (here) makes some interesting proposals: how can you preserve retail diversity, and the character of neighbourhoods that this creates?

Some of the changes they recommend relate to planning policy, and in particular use classes. If your boredom threshold is low, you might want to skip the rest of this paragraph. Land and building uses are categorised by Government, and local authorities uise them to define what activities are allowed on a particular site: retail, offices, housing, industrial uses, etc. 'Retail' includes sub-classes for shops, financial and professional services (ie, banks, estate agents and bookies), restaurants and cafes, drinking establishments and hot food takeaways. In general, changes within a particular use class are permitted, but changes between use classes require planning permission.

The K&C Commission suggested putting small shops into a new category, and making mergers of smaller units a matter for planning consideration. They also proposed creating a new class for coffee shops, to prevent local retail being 'Starbucked'. The report also suggests letting councils take over large shops' car parks, to remove their unfair advantage, and even toys with the idea of creating special 'retail conservation areas'.

Why is this interesting? Firstly, because retail conservation areas could be seen as the next step in the heritage movement. Since the mid 1960s, we have woken up to the value of the every day buildings that surround us (of which more in another post soon), but have paid little attention to their use. A listed factory building or church can be changed into housing as long as it looks the same. Protecting the use of a building, as well its looks, is a pretty radical move, more reminiscent of the way we approach farmland, than buildings in the centre of a city.

It's a pretty conservative move too, though not one that would seem strange in New York or Paris. The leadership of Kensington and Chelsea is Conservative, but this feels like a far cry from the laissez-faire world of the market, seeking to protect shops like Rough Trade (a collectivist record shop) from the depradations of capitalism.

Thirdly, like most people, I am deeply hypocritical about shopping. I love smaller shops in theory, but the half-stale produce and limited range soon sends me scuttling to Sainsburys. Perhaps the streets where I live are slightly less replete with specialist sourdough bakeries than the streets of Notting Hill are. Not every small shop is worth saving.

Similarly, when I work in poorer parts of London, they don't tend to worry about small retailers. They feel they have too many of them already. They want Starbucks. They want Tescos. They want that holy grail of upwards mobility, Pizza Express. Keeeping good small shops afloat is important, but should we really rely on planning to save us from our own actions?

First post

2007-06-09T13:12:00.000+01:00

Well, the London Olympics have shown their unifying force. With a great fanfare, the new London 2012 logo was launched last week, and the nation came together to take the piss.

Whatever the merits of the new logo, it has unleashed a torrent of creative abuse and mockery. Does it resemble a broken swastika? Larry Grayson in teapot stance? David Brent dancing? Lisa Simpson doing something lewd and quite possibly illegal? The UK's GDP must have taken a pounding last week: normal business was suspended, in favour of that Great British pastime, mockery.

Co-incidentally, Communities and Local Government Minister Ruth Kelly announced a desire for a British 'national day', another of the Government's fumbles at national identity (here). The trouble is, all assessments of what 'Britishness' means dissolve quickly into cliche: tolerance, rule of law, sense of humour, blah. Sense of humour gets nearest, but the reality is less cuddly than that. Our real characteristic is the ability to laugh at anything. Anything.

In his wartime polemic, 'The Lion and the Unicorn' (the source for John Major's much-mocked evocation of 'old maids cycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist), George Orwell argued that the goose-step would never have caught on in England: "because the people in the street would laugh".

Our laughter is not gentle. It is scatalogical, harsh, unforgiving. It infects the engravings of Hogarth and Gillray. It has no respect for authority, and is ready to attack any trace of pretension or pomposity. It's not pleasant, but it is ours.